Travel Agent Thriving After Closing Prominent Storefront
by Richard D’Ambrosio /
If you were a retail travel agency serving business and leisure travelers in and around Boston, you couldn’t ask for a better location than Brookline, MA. This 59,000-resident, western urban Boston enclave (home to New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft and his quarterback Tom Brady) has a median household income of $94,000. It also borders many of the city’s famous universities.
But when Bruce Berger, co-owner of Cleveland Circle Travel of Needham, MA, and his partner Glenn Bornstein had an opportunity to consolidate their two offices, their high-profile Washington Square location wasn’t enough of a factor to maintain the storefront.
On the face of it, Berger said, many business owners might have opted for the more prominent Brookline location, which welcomes tens of thousands of athletes and spectators annually for the Boston Marathon and is close to so many high-spending professionals and college faculty. Indeed, Berger said, the storefront was a great advertisement for the agency’s services.
“Needham has considerably less foot traffic than Brookline,” although “Tom Brady never walked into my store,” he joked.
Move reflects industry changes
Cleveland Circle has been family owned and operated since it opened in 1960, and quintupled in size about 20 years ago when it purchased an agency in nearby Needham, Berger said. It is part of a large minority of travel agencies—slightly more than one out of three nationwide—that still has a storefront, according to the American Society of Travel Agents' 2016 Agency Profile Report.
With about 20 staff, averaging 15 years’ experience, and serving a 60/40 business-to-leisure travel split, call volume, workflow and home-office preferences made the decision relatively straightforward for Cleveland Circle. The company, an American Express Travel Services rep agency, purchased its Needham space and an additional 1,000 square feet on the second floor where the company has communal space that agents can share.
“A lot of our staff like to work out of the office for at least part of the week,” Berger said. He needed more floor space than Brookline could offer, and the hometowns of many of his staff made the Needham office more conducive for their occasional commutes to the office.
Berger said the agency never considered sending all of Cleveland Circle’s agents to home offices. “Our people want some kind of office space for some period of time. There’s an exchange of information that happens here that doesn’t exist in an online/home office environment. The fact that someone can ask their colleagues about a destination they have never booked, or a reservation procedure, is important.”
While top producers “work mostly out of their homes, even they come in at least once a week for face-to-face interaction.” The consolidation has also helped Cleveland Circle cut down on “staffing difficulties,” Berger said. For some agents, the Brookline office wasn’t an easy commute, so it made his managing and supervising staff more complex.
So far so good
Cleveland Circle left Brookline in October, and Berger and Bornstein are closely monitoring bookings. “We were worried we would lose more customers, thinking we went out of business,” Berger conceded. However, so far bookings don’t indicate that has happened. “We’re fortunate that the space is still for rent, so our ‘We moved’ signs are still up,” he noted.
But more importantly, the fact that both his leisure and business customers primarily operate on the phone has made the consolidation a relatively painless one. “So much of my business is from outside of my area that people don’t even know I moved,” he said. He concedes that “we’ll lose some walk-in business, but that won’t add up to the cost savings.”
Still, Berger looks back fondly on the Washington Square location. “One of the things I will miss is not having the marathon run past my front door every year,” he said.