Charlie Funk
Did you ever have one of those times when you couldn't decide if you were in the middle of a Charlie Brown "Good grief!" day or a General-Halftrack-from-Beetle-Bailey "Now what?" day?
Me, too. It's just that they seem to be coming more often and closer together.
This profession we have chosen has never been an easy, get-rich-quick enterprise, despite what the card mills and MLM purveyors would have one believe.
Over the years, my columns have touched on many aspects that make this a challenging profession with the rewards not always being financial. I offered an analysis some six years ago suggesting that, taking inflation into account, agents needed to generate about four times as many bookings to make the same amount of money they did in 1994. That hasn't changed.
Those who have read my columns in the past know I am and will always be a proponent of greater professionalism in the industry. I have long advocated that there should be some sort of governing body that acts as a credentialing service and to whom suppliers should offer incentives to encourage participation.
Over time we would reach a point that the travel-buying public would know that someone who offered travel-planning services and had a suffix stitched to their name was better informed, more knowledgeable and (dare I say) more legitimate than someone without that suffix.
And then, the Internet and news networks are peppered with stories about this agent or that agent who took a person's money and never made reservations or sent payment to the supplier. You come in on the tail-end of a news story that has some hapless victim explaining how they were fleeced of thousands of dollars by a travel agent. Good grief, Charlie Brown!
The most recent incident involves a family who thought they had a trip to Jamaica booked but somehow didn't and claim to have been swindled out of $10,000. The travel agent allegedly responsible is mentioned prominently.
A couple of years ago, there was a similar incident involving a rather sizable group going to Disney World who arrived at the park only to find that apparently none of the $60,000 or so they had paid the travel agency had been forwarded to Disney. The incident was widely reported on local television. It seems the agency owner had required everyone to pay by either cash, check or PayPal. The invoices and statements sent to the clients showed invalid reservation numbers.
Another incident several years ago involved a student band who allegedly paid an agent more than $100,000 for a trip to perform at a televised event. No money was ever sent to the supplier, so the students (and parents) were denied the opportunity to perform and lost their money. This incident also received widespread television coverage.
What is a reputable travel retailer to do to counteract all this negative publicity? One answer is to get in front of the problem and address it proactively. Break the bad-news feedback loop.
The last two incidents occurred in Middle Tennessee, and I contacted the local TV stations, offering to do an interview offering tips on how to recognize potential problems and avoid disappointment.
Key points were to be very cautious if an agency insisted on a form of payment that excluded credit cards, always ask for written confirmation from the agency and supplier, as well as other best practices we have learned over the years.
At some point, I realized that as important as professional conduct and training are to our industry, there is no assurance of honesty. And that applies to other professions as well, most of which have strict licensing and certification requirements.
Who among us hasn't read or heard stories of dishonest medical practitioners who billed insurers or Medicare fraudulently, or attorneys who misappropriated funds entrusted to them? I guess the biggest difference is the magnitude of the amount stolen. Miscreants unfortunately can be found in any business.
As if the criminal actions of travel sellers at other agencies weren't enough to sometimes make this a stressful profession, more than a few agency owners have related examples of internal dishonesty that in some cases cost them thousands of dollars. Owners can't do anything about other agencies, but they can and should, as a matter of sound business principles, have safeguards and checks and balances in place.
Just what sorts of things can happen? Let's look at a few.
• The agent had been a faithful employee for 11 years. One would have likely never found anyone more dedicated to the agency. He rarely ever took more than a long weekend off, had not taken a real vacation in years and was a model of what every agency owner looks for.
Things began to unravel when he had a heart attack and didn't come to work for a week. Mail started arriving addressed to him, with checks for vacation reservations made payable to the agent -- for bookings that didn't exist anywhere in the agency, in either a file cabinet or computer database, that no one knew anything about. It took breaking into the agent's desk to learn that.
The agent was making the bookings, collecting all monies in checks made out to him. He was paying the net amount of the vacation with his personal credit card and was booking enough business legitimately to avert suspicion while he funneled thousands of dollars away from the agency.
• I wrote the front office booking system we used for 15 years because there wasn't another application available that had the ease of use and power that mine did. Without taking up a lot of space, an agent we hired who was a vacation-selling machine discovered that if a cost element (i.e., airfare) was entered on the booking but the number of people using that element wasn't, it would reduce the sales price of the vacation by the value of the element. It meant that a $7,000 vacation with $1,500 worth of air that wasn't included could be sold for $5,500. Not surprisingly, her pricing was well below any other agency the client checked.
She was called for jury duty just before I was to write a huge bonus check to reward her performance, and the whole scheme came apart.
There are literally dozens of other examples that I would share if space permitted, offering testament to the nefarious creativity of some dishonest individuals.
Now what? Here are some suggestions based on 35 years of operating an agency for how to avoid unpleasant situations before they arise. I'm sure that some of my readers just left the room because none of this would ever apply to them. I admire their confidence. But we all have automobile insurance even though we never plan to have a wreck. So here goes:
• All supplier reservation and payment confirmations come to the agency owner or manager. It doesn't matter if it's an email or snail mail. No exceptions. They can be distributed to the booking agent from there.
• A third party cross-checks the agency's data with the supplier's data. Agencies that use software such as Clientbase and similar programs that import supplier data directly into the agency's database make this a much simpler task, but this does not necessarily eliminate the need to cross-check.
• If your agency accumulates reservation information in a traditional file folder, those folders live in a common file cabinet. The files never live on or in the agent's desk. Ever.
• Only the owner, manager or bookkeeper enters cash or check payments into the accounting system. The cash or check payment can be entered in the front-office system but only a designated person enters the payment in the back-office system that updates the booking.
Are these few best practices all that are needed to avoid problems? Absolutely not, but they're a start. I would love you to share problems that have come up, how you discovered them and steps you took to prevent recurrence. Also, take a look at Travel Agency Best Practices, a Facebook group for travel retailers that deals with situations like the ones above and more.