However, after months of struggle and setbacks, a potential silver lining has emerged: Travel advisors’ effective advocacy for clients stranded or stymied during the global lockdown has now become perhaps their strongest selling point.
“The bottom line is that the adversity of the last 15 months is not without some value,” said James Ferrara, co-founder and president of the Delray Beach, Florida-based InteleTravel network of some 60,000 home-based travel advisors. “For us, it drove customers back to a respect for professional advice and assistance.
“I don’t want to sound callous in any way; I’m very empathetic,” he cautioned. “I just want people to understand that you can use a travel agent.”
That’s because when Ferrara got into the business three decades ago, he saw a survey that “put travel agents somewhere below used car salesmen in terms of trust, credibility and value,” he said. “We’ve come a long way from that, and the last year has accelerated that.”
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Even before the crisis, some travelers remained loyal to advisors. “Before all of this, [planning] felt like an overwhelming process for clients who’d come to me,” said travel advisor Mike Rubinstein, owner and director of travel firm UprouteMe in Los Angeles. “They were staring at their computers, trying to sift through the mounds of information, misinformation and disinformation as far as travel goes, so I was always a help to them.
“But now, more than ever, with this added layer [of crisis], I think there’s just so much value added in coming to a travel planner.”
Jessica Griscavage, an advisor and director of marketing at McCabe World Travel in McLean, Virginia, recalls answering her mobile on a Friday night at the onset of the pandemic. It was her contact at the Four Seasons Resort and Residences Anguilla informing her that her client shouldn’t head to the airport in the morning because the Caribbean island had just closed its borders.
“The next day, we booked that client on a driving trip to Florida instead,” she said. “We were not only fighting for our clients and working to get them refunds and date changes — for those who were still willing to travel, we switched gears and got them to do something else.”
Griscavage said March and April of 2020 were the two worst months of her entire career. “It happened right at spring break time, which was going to be my best spring break on record,” she said. “I was thinking ‘This is going to go away in a month and a half; it’s Zika [virus] all over again.’”
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Instead, lockdowns continued from spring into summer and beyond. Rubinstein said his last client traveled in February 2020. “I literally had to close down for a year to keep afloat and try to figure out how to restructure my processes,” he said, adding he enrolled in a six-month paralegal course at UCLA in case travel didn’t bounce back.
Through it all, “we were just refunding and refunding, and we were fighting for our clients,” said Griscavage.
Despite that nonstop advocacy, travel advisors — for the most part, women operating small businesses — didn’t get paid when clients didn’t travel, noted Zane Kerby, CEO of the American Society of Travel Advisors in Alexandria, Virginia. “Our members keep planning, replanning and rebooking, so they’re doing more work and still not being paid for it,” he said. “The pandemic revealed a real weakness in the compensation structure for travel advisors.”
While there was a big push in many regions to support local shops, bars and restaurants amid lockdown, “people forgot about the other side of the hospitality industry, from the flight attendant and travel advisor to the [hotel] housekeeper,” Griscavage said. “It impacted our industry in a really bad way.”
Advisors weren’t always the endangered species they sometimes seem. Once upon a time, back in the pre-internet era, you’d take a short trip to a travel agency before setting out on a family vacation or business trip. Few people had the travel know-how or connections to book airfare, hotels stays or tour packages on their own, and travel agents would handle it all for you free of charge.
With the dawn of so-called online travel agencies, discount consolidator sites and travel supplier web portals in the late 1990s, consumers were able to book much of their travel themselves, at home, sometimes saving money in the process. (Gen Xers, who came of age as online agencies debuted, “were really the culprits here,” said Ferrara. ) Suppliers even started to cut travel advisor commissions altogether.
Using the internet cut out “the middleman” — i.e., the travel advisor, who was paid a commission by airlines, hotel chains and tour operators — so suppliers could offer seeming bargains at their own self-service sites or at online travel agencies. Problems arose, however, with unforeseen bumps in the road — natural disasters, political crises, industry strikes — and then travelers largely had to fend for themselves.
And what a bump Covid turned out to be. “When the pandemic hit, literally months of planning — for destination weddings, 50-year anniversary trips, these type of things — all this wonderful work was really all just for naught,” said Kerby. “Everything was just canceled in a matter of days — and with it, the modest commissions our members make to feed their families disappeared.”
But advisors’ work has continued. Ferrara said travel supplier cancellation and change policies changed weekly, their telephone lines were jammed and travel insurance claims had to be examined.
“Rules and regulations seem to change overnight,” Kerby said, citing a daily airline update he gets about safety, testing requirements and even local curfews that most travelers aren’t aware of. “That’s why the role of the travel advisor is more crucial than ever.
“The consumer they’re advocating for doesn’t have a relationship with all the various suppliers necessary in order to put together a really successful trip.”
