Blog homeIts not often that I read articles on travel industry news websites where I disagree as strongly as I have done today.
Mind you, its not often that anyone publishes anything vaguely interesting about travel ecommerce on any travel industry news website (it is all technology company product news - or news about travel products - which frankly I don’t need to fill my brain with) - so I don’t get much opportunity to agree or disagree with anything. (oh gawd, I see this post is going the wrong way already) (on a side note - if you talk to the web or system teams within large travel companies - none of them read either the physical trade press nor online travel industry news sites - and Travolution doesn’t even penetrate very well - none of these media are relevant to their jobs - although Travolution would be a good read if they knew about it….)
Today TravelMole have published a report by Jeremy Skidmore, a well respected UK / Australia / US travel industry journalist that I have shared a stage with at a conference a while back. He normally talks a lot of sense. The title of their article - “Learn how to sell or fail” (registration required).
In the article Jeremy is reporting from the Elite travel group conference in Jerez (Elite are a consortium of UK travel agents). Most of what he has written is in quotes.
Lets get to the beef.
Travel agents are in a sales industry and if they do not learn how to sell, they will be left behind, delegates were told.
In an entertaining presentation, Beachcomber Tours UK sales manager Sarah Archer used videos to portray how life had changed for agents and warned they needed to move with the times.
“Direct sell tour operators are a big threat to traditional travel agents and tour operators because they are offering the same product for a lower price, so how do you beat them?,” she asked.
“You face up to the challenge. You must sell and get sales training for your staff. Use your experience and high level of customer service. Learn how to judge your clients’ body language and what to say to make a sale.
Why do I consider this to be so wrong? It is like going into a candlestick factory and doing a “time and motion” study. Yes - you may end up designing a more efficient candlestick factory…. but what you ought to be doing is moving to selling lightbulbs!
My theory (that I have been pushing for a few years) is that there is a core difference between a travel agent and a tour operator.
In essence a travel agent (especially a high street one, or one working with a selected list of customers) has the full attention of one customer at any one time. Their challenge is to find an appropriate product for that individual customer. Hence travel agent systems are about “search” and “sales”. They need to have access, via technology, to multiple product providers - so if someone comes in wanting a villa in Turkey or a trip to Las Vegas they can sell it…. if that is what that individual customer wants.
In reverse, a tour operator has a shortlist of product. Maybe they only sell trips to Las Vegas. They have a marketing challenge…. because the challenge is to find customers who want to go to Las Vegas. They have to find customers that match their product. This is the reverse mentality to travel agents. Its a marketing problem.
So, yes, travel agents can survive (maybe) - but not by getting better at selling (and it is patronising to agents to tell them that to survive they need to get better at selling - because normally they are pretty damm good already). What they need to be focussing on is creating environments where customers can buy from them and getting the right customers to visit these environments (it could be a website, a shop, a call centre etc). They need to learn to market not learn to sell.
Oh well, I guess I won’t be asked to speak at any travel agent conferences in the near future….
Any more rants like this - and I will probably have to go and write for Travel Rants!
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