The largest elephant in our room

Richard Turen

Last week I received an email from a gentleman I had just booked on a $37,000 trip. We had talked several times, and he was ready to make a deposit. But there was a paragraph in his note that sort of jumped out:

"Should I submit the deposit directly to the tour operator, and do they take credit cards? And how do I pay you for your extra fees?"

Now, as you might imagine, we'd had several conversations about the trip they were booking. During the last of those conversations he mentioned, "We know we'll be paying a bit more, but we hear you're worth it."

The reason I want to share this story with you is that the client was a top executive at one of this country's largest airlines. He has been traveling around the world for years, and yet he had absolutely no understanding of how travel consultants work or how we are compensated.

There are any number of executives in the travel industry, I believe, who do not understand our most common compensation model: giving all applicable discounts back to the client while charging absolutely nothing for tours and ocean or river cruises.

Two weeks earlier, I had taken a call from a client couple who were upset that the cruise line they were booked with had refused to take their credit card for final payment. They were told they would have to do that through us, a fact that thoroughly confused them.

Now I assume that my clients are smarter, better-dressed and much better-looking than your clients. But that doesn't matter.

The recently released CLIA North American Cruise Market Profile revealed that 30% of the public assumes they will get the best pricing by booking direct. The sample for the study consisted of 1,600 adults who had taken at least one cruise.

An amazing 47% of respondents said they would get the best pricing on OTAs or other websites. Only 19% said that travel agents would secure the best pricing for their clients.

So here's the name of the elephant in our room: 81% of the public, according to this study, believe that booking through a travel agent costs more than other available options. The perception is that you pay more to use our services.

My personal observations would tend to support this data. I am amazed at the number of highly educated, well-traveled, current or former executives who have absolutely no idea how travel agents are compensated.

This inability of our profession to address this misperception has interested me for more than two decades. So let me suggest a way we can fight it.

First, let's all admit that the organizations that purport to represent us are not really capable of taking on suppliers' direct-booking efforts or of articulating the dangers of booking anything with an OTA. It just won't happen.

CLIA is an educational organization that devotes most of its efforts to making the products of its cruise-line members more appealing. It is not an agent organization. I am a member of CLIA, I support its educational aims, and I would say that it has made enormous strides.

But its goal is not to bring down cruise lines that keep growing their direct business or click-and-book online sales predators whose primary interests are quick sales rather than a lasting and caring personal relationship with their customers. CLIA won't be taking on Expedia anytime soon.

ASTA, of course, is less easily defined. It has to be because so much of the wonderful work it does has to do with fighting battles with various legislatures, some involving quiet work behind the scenes. But ASTA is not in a position to fight direct or OTA website bookings in any meaningful way. ASTA is too dignified for that battle, and OTAs are also members.

Still, there are some good signs out there.

Anyone examining the perception that travel agents are more costly than other booking channels can sense some progress as the "Return of the Travel Agent" story is being told more widely -- with ASTA's help, I might add -- in many media outlets. But this could be analogous to some of the military alliance issues currently facing our country: It would be wonderful to have a coordinated effort involving our travel allies, but that isn't going to happen. We travel consultants will have to fight this perception/pricing thing on our own by taking the battle directly to our clients.

Over the years, I have tried to avoid "this is the way we do it" advice. But I thought you might be interested in seeing one facet of our multipronged effort to discredit alternative booking options and to show them for what they really are: simple sites that claim to sell "cheapest" when in the vast majority of cases, the claim is inaccurate.

Here is a little letter I designed to be distributed to clients who seem not to understand the dynamics of our compensation model. I want you to feel free to use it if that would be helpful (See box at right):

Now that is a rough letter, and I imagine I will be receiving some rough responses. But if your starting point as a travel agent is that you want to treat your clients as honored guests, showing them the same level of consultation and respect you might provide to members of your own family, you have to take on this battle. People care. Computers don't -- and "headsets" reading scripts from computers don't.

By the way, I chose not to include the photo that would accompany the letter: a call center sweat-shop. But trust me, it's a classic.