The next time you smash your keyboard and curse about how slow the internet has been today you might want to spare a thought for your ‘more experienced’ (older) colleagues who’ve been booking holidays since the same decade most Travel Agents these days were actually born in – the nineties.
Some would call it the ‘Golden Age’ of the travel industry, commissions were high, competition was low and it cost half a year’s salary to fly to London.
It was also a time where TA’s truly needed to know their shit. If a customer asked a question, you had to either know the answer or flip through a mountain of brochures hoping it might be there. Now we can simply Google it and pretend that we knew all along.
It was also an exciting time for Travel Agents. A computer may have been installed by the end of the decade. Yes, a computer – normally one per shop, maybe two for a busy location.
So instead of using a binder the size of a phonebook to search all of the available fare sheets these were actually loaded onto a fancy computer that could save hundreds of paper cuts.
The Golden Age of Travel
If anybody needed to communicate with an airline, tour company, embassy, etc the only way to do it was via telephone or fax machine. Yeah, that weird thing that could send typed messages all over the world (unless the damn line was busy). I started as a Travel Agent in 2006 and we STILL heavily relied on our fax machine to get things done.
So you know how nowadays we just print an e-ticket (or not) and happily skip to the check in counter? Yeah, that didn’t come into play until around 2007-2008. We used these funny little blue and purple ticket books – if you lost one of these bad boys you were really up shit-creek as most of the time they were irreplaceable – if they were it took twelve weeks. Went through the washing machine? Bad luck mate, buy a new ticket.
Agents also had to hand-write these tickets, so their penmanship had to be on point.
When it was time to take payment from our customer’s cash was king. The Friday bank run was usually a sketchy one with maybe up to 50K tucked into your skirt – a quick stop in the pub first for a wine and a pull on the pokies? It happened.
If a client did want to use their plastic then it was done with one of those huge, clunky, imprinting, swipe thingies. Although it was definitely a satisfying motion to make after bagging a sale!
Commissions were high, competition was low and it cost half a year’s salary to fly to London
Airline reps were a lot more relevant back then too. Weekly visits were normal – these days most airlines don’t even employ them anymore and if they do you might be lucky to see them once a year. If you needed something fixed you went to your trusty rep (who would ALWAYS be invited to Friday drinks).
That leads me to my next point. Travel Agents now think that the parties are pretty crazy. From what I’ve heard from a few little birdies we ain’t got nothing on what used to go on at monthly awards and end of year ball’s. Debauchery reigned and HR was just as involved as anyone else.
So, if you work in the industry – find someone that still listens to Duran Duran and ask him or her for some gossip about what went down back in the day – and if you start tearing your hair out when the Internet goes down for fifteen minutes just spare a thought for our Travel Agent pioneers who still walk around with a crooked neck from spending a decade on hold to the airlines with a phone tucked between their chin and shoulder.
