Customers seem to have finally got the memo about the importance of travel agents, but has everyone else in the industry supply chain?
Greg Mangos, the director of Travel Utopia in Erina, is like most travel advisors across the country: busy. Things have been, as he says, “a smidge nuts”.
I’d just landed in Toronto and shot off a quick email to Mangos before breakfast about my upcoming domestic flights. I didn’t expect a reply until Australia woke up, but his response was almost immediate. It was 11.44pm in Sydney. I joked about him being on Toronto time.
“I’m across all timezones lately,” he said.
Borders across the world were reopening and it was like the “dam walls had burst”, he tells Karryon. Suddenly everyone wanted to travel. But travel was more complex and people were hounding their travel advisors like never before.
The waters may have calmed a little, but Mangos is still “insanely” busy. He’s working 10-12 hours a day and often on weekends.
“I’m relieved that it’s now just red hot busyness, not unbearably white hot like it was,” he says.
Why are travel agents so busy?
The sheer volume of enquiries and the additional complexities with each enquiry are keeping Mangos and his team on the run.
But Mangos is grateful that the ever-changing pandemic-related travel requirements have eased.
“We had to constantly collate and amend information to help our clients navigate the myriad of links and paperwork necessary for travel at the time,” he recalls.
Now, Mangos says “the lopsided ratio of supply to demand” has resulted in extremely limited availability. This means agents wanting to find good value options for their clients are having to expand their search parameters to more dates/routes/airlines and so on.
“And then there’s the incessant schedule changes from airlines who are realigning all their schedules to catch up with demand post pandemic.
“This scuppers well laid plans and forces us to sometimes quadruple handle bookings to suitably reaccommodate our passengers and minimise disruption. In many cases this requires long holds to airlines often over five hours (and often more than once for the same booking).”
The bad kind of busy
Travel advisor Sekha Walsh tells Karryon how just adding a rollaway to a client’s hotel booking quickly turned into an exercise in futility.
“Adding a rollaway should really take no more than 30 minutes,” he says.
“But it has taken a week going back and forth with the supplier.”
While the problem was eventually solved, it took Walsh more than 20 phone calls and 15 emails to fix it.
When the busyness of a travel agent is productive, that’s fine. It’s another thing entirely when their time is eaten up by challenges like this.
“As a business owner it’s great to be busy, however being overly swamped can become detrimental,” Greg Mangos agreed.
So does Mangos want the busyness to continue?
“Ideally we’re searching for quality over quantity to create the right balance between available resource and income requirements,” he says.
“Having too many bookings in a time of dwindling airline commissions results in more time sapping management of voluntary and involuntary changes. This exposes us to greater risk in the unlikely event of future travel restrictions (we’ve been once bitten… but it was a big bite!!!).”
How airlines and suppliers can help
Agents don’t just want commissions, they want real support from the suppliers they are supporting.
“It’s imperative that our suppliers continue to value the services we provide, which ultimately costs us and saves them swathes of time and labour,” says Mangos. “We help share their load during a time when they’re struggling to upstaff quickly enough to meet surging demand.”
“It’s only right that they continue to remunerate us for selling their products and servicing our collective clients.”
According to Mangos, both the travel industry and their direct customers are “desperate for these companies to get enough trained staff back into their positions to be able to help in a reasonable amount of time”.
“Airlines in particular are enjoying such a boon of high yields and high revenues, and they need to provide the industry and their direct clientele with a level of trained service commensurate with the increased pricing they are charging customers for effectively the same products, but in many cases inferior pre-, during, and post-travel customer service.”
Practical support is key, says ETG
How Entire Travel Group (ETG) supports its agency partners is pretty simple.
“We make it as easy as possible – in the high-pressure, low resources post-pandemic environment – for agents to book our product,” ETG sales and marketing director Greg McCallum tells Karryon.
The company has done practical things like launching a booking engine that extends its operating hours from 8am-5pm, to 24/7, 365 days a year.
They’ve also eliminated the need for a log-in, so agents don’t waste time forever forgetting and resetting passwords.
And agents can generate as many quotes as they want, 24/7. They receive a colour PDF document by e-mail within seconds of making the quote. This includes real-time gross pricing, agent logo, lead passenger details, start and end dates and a day-by-day colour itinerary.
“But we recognise that even with the best website in the business, agents still need support,” McCallum says.
“As a full-service wholesale operator we answer calls inside 10 minutes and emails inside 24 hours.” And the person on the other end? They know their stuff.
