Richard Turen
If I asked you to name the profession that most closely resembles that of the travel agent, how would you respond?
On a purely intellectual level, I would hope that travel sellers are akin to physicians or attorneys. We listen to the client, we carefully examine their needs and then we execute a plan that is in their best interest.
I would also love to believe that our work comes closest to the job description of an architect. We work on taking a project, a vacation, and design something that fulfills the client's dreams. We do leisure time construction work.
But as my friends who head up some of the major tour firms and cruise lines tell me privately, I have a monumental naivete about the average practitioner dabbling away in the travel arts. Most of us travel agents couldn't construct a decent sales marketing plan if a free trip to Jamaica depended on it.
The fact is that the job most analogous to ours, at least in the minds of those we serve, is the local real estate agent. They are commission-based, and we are commission-based. They use technology, and we use technology. They depend on referrals, and so do we. Many of them rebate, and so do many of us. And, like us, the public seems to perceive them as being middlemen who can be easily replaced by less costly online alternatives.
It might be instructive to spend a few moments today looking at this group that the general public seems to feel is most like us.
In August 2013, real estate giant Re/Max went public, an act of supreme confidence for a leading player in a doomed sport. Writing for the Washington Post that month, Lydia DePillis wondered why Re/Max had not gotten the message that the Internet was driving them out of business.
After all, she wrote, our digital age had destroyed all kinds of middlemen. Weren't travel agents "rendered obsolete by Expedia and Orbitz"? And what about sellers of books, gifts, home accessories? Weren't they all being driven out of business by Amazon, a company that will eventually convert all of the nation's golf courses into fulfillment warehouses with tiny drone airports attached?
Guess what? The average real estate agent made more than $50,000 last year. The percentage of homeowners who now sell their homes without an agent has actually declined to below 10%.
In August 2014, Zillow announced it would buy Trulia for the tidy sum of $3.5 billion. As the industry publication RealtyTrac commented, "Like travel agents before them, many real estate agents worry that the Zillow-Trulia shotgun wedding will not only destroy the traditional agent-client relationship, but it also threatens to destroy the National Association of Realtors."
Real estate industry journalists are fond of quoting stories in which the travel agent channel has been completely decimated. RealtyTrac writer Octavio Nuiry, in his article titled "Are Realtors the Travel Agents of the 21st Century?" points out that "two decades ago, the travel agent industry was wiped out by websites like Expedia and Hotwire."
This is useful information because it has helped me understand that I am the lone survivor of the travel agent wars. The rest of you disappeared 20 years ago. That would mean that I am the only one reading my own column, and I don't always do that.
Actually, silliness like this in the real estate community is understandable. Zillow's CEO, Spencer Rascoff, had co-founded Hotwire.com, and its co-founder, Rich Barton, had founded Expedia. Their accomplishments are significant, and their reputations as category killers preceded them in their new real estate ventures.
Fortunately -- and I choose that word carefully -- the travel agent community has been pruned of its excesses. Studies I've seen place the number of agents departing the profession in the last decade at somewhere between 40% and 50%. The free-travel wannabes have largely left, nonproductive outside contractors have lost their affiliations with better agency groups and consortia have become enviable hubs of excellence as opposed to commission-based extortion rings hungering for more and more members.
But let's be honest here. Go to any major trade show and you will still be shocked at what passes for professionalism in our industry after we have had half of our workforce go into other fields. Like real estate. I'd love to know how many former outside-sales people or travel agent card-mill graduates have now left the real estate field after learning that when you flash a real estate business card you don't get a free house.
Don Peppers, a highly regarded management guru and author, talks about the level of fragility that those facing obsolescence often achieve. It has a lot to do, Peppers believes, with the manner in which the seller reacts to the current environment.
In the digital age, change occurs more quickly; you and I have been discussing this for many years in this space. So I think it is fair to say that travel agents and real estate agents each find themselves facing a "radically changed" environment.
Peppers believes that those who react with minimal changes to the way they do business will soon find themselves redundant to the technology.
The concept of real estate sellers becoming obsolete is addressed by Bruce Kasanoff, a writer I like who specializes in issues of social innovation.
Kasanoff's cautions are highly relevant to travel sellers. We should heed his warnings to real estate agents who, he points out, all joined a profession that, at its beginnings, had no Internet rivals. The broker controlled the information. Sitting in a chair at home, you would not be able to know anything about the homes being sold in your neighborhood.
Now, the one thing that is keeping real estate agents afloat is a regulatory environment (supported by heavy-duty lobbying efforts) that no longer protect consumers interests but are centered on protecting the continued existence of the real estate professional.
The professional who is facing future obsolescence, Kasanoff says, has only two options: The first is to go with the flow, as most real estate and travel agents are doing, make minimal adjustments to the way you do business and face certain irrelevance down the road. Kasanoff's road, by the way, is just a few years long.
The second option is to, quite literally, reinvent your business model. To do that, travel businesses will, I believe, need to do several things:
- Imagine that you are inventing a new profession to assist travelers. What would you be called, and what would you do? Reimagine your business, forgetting competitors, perceived or real. If you were to design your business from the ground up, taking into consideration today's technological realities, what would it look like? Dream it, and then build it.
- Forget about hoarding travel information. Figure out the best ways to be a "best travel information distributor."
- Be the most truthful travel voice in your community. Earn the consumers' respect by telling them all the things travel suppliers and crowdsourced websites won't tell them about their products.
- Figure out how to maximize the time travel sellers spend personally building relationships with clients. No tech writer I am aware of has ever predicted that this extraordinary human ability to forge a genuine bond with another human being will ever be replicated in our lifetime.
- Always utilize technology where it is useful to your clients and totally reliable. Wake up from your stupor, and go on the offensive against any source that claims to have a lock on collective wisdom (as in self-anointed critics).
Your personal success -- our personal success -- will, I believe, come down to our ability to define the human attributes and level of care and concern that make our role in the travel selection and booking process irreplaceable.