Are you a travel advisor or a travel agent? A travel professional or a travel specialist? Or do you just answer to anyone who isn’t asking you to price-match Skyscanner?
Names matter. Just ask the poor sod named Circumcision (we couldn’t make that one up). Call yourself a travel agent, and do you run the risk of devaluing your offering? Call yourself anything else, and do you simply confuse the customer?
Travel Agent Finder’s Anna Shannon tells Karryon she thought long and hard about putting ‘travel agent’ in her business name.
Shannon believes the “levels of service, personalisation and care” travel ‘agents’ provide equates to the ‘consultants’, ‘specialists’ or ‘advisors’ of other industries.
But try as she might, Shannon couldn’t ignore the Google search data.
“People searching for this service online were searching for travel agents and not travel advisors,” she says.
“More than just a name change”: AFTA boss
In August 2018, the American Society of Travel Agents (ASTA) became the American Society of Travel Advisors. Very conveniently, the ASTA acronym survived unscathed.
ASTA president Zane Kerby claimed the switch reflected a more accurate description of the society’s members. The name has stuck.
Our homegrown version, the Australian Federation of Travel Agents (AFTA), could make the same change (and also keep its acronym). But it’s not so simple, AFTA chief executive Dean Long tells Karryon.
Long believes the term ‘travel agent’ is, in fact, “outdated and no longer reflects the full scope of what we do and the services we provide”. And many others have told him the same. He points out that AFTA has been using ‘travel professionals’ in its media releases and interviews “for some time now”.
But Long warns that “the legal importance of the agent-principal relationship also contains some key nuances”. He suggests any change “requires detailed consultation” and is “more than just a name change.”
The NSW Department of Fair Trading defines an agent as “a person who is part of an agent-principal relationship”. This means that agents are generally expected to act on behalf of the principal (usually the client who has contracted them).
And it’s for this reason that Travellers Choice managing director Christian Hunter worries the term ‘travel agent’ could create confusion.
“Are they an agent of the customer or the service provider? I think both could have a different perspective,” he tells Karryon.
The relatively recent phenomenon of agents now charging service fees rather than relying on being paid commissions seems to have doubly complicated this.
“As we move into the next phase of our industry’s evolution, I think this needs debate. I’m not wedded to any particular moniker, but ‘travel advisor’ seems to me the most suitable of the current options,” Hunter says.
Say my name, say my name
“I still call myself a travel agent,” The Don’t Forget Travel Group director Andrew Sullivan tells Karryon.
“I have also on occasions called myself a ‘travel advisor’, ‘travel designer’ and ‘travel concierge’ amongst other things.”
But Sullivan says that doing so can sometimes come across as “a bit pretentious”.
It’s “as though you are trying to make something more important than it really is – and that just says to me that you don’t know your own worth or see the value that you bring to the table.”
Ultimately, Travel Agent Finder’s Anna Shannon says that no matter what travel agents want to call themselves, the term ‘travel agent’ is ingrained in the Australian mindset.
Does that matter? The answer seems pretty universal.
“At the end of the day, it’s the service we provide and how good we are at our job that gets the repeat and referral business, not our titles,” says Shannon.
Or as Andrew Sullivan says, “I don’t really care what people call me…as long as they call!”