Seven Ways Young Travel Agents Are Reinventing The Business

With their “laptop lifestyles,” deep embrace of social platforms, and tendency to ignore old rules and boundaries, young professionals are reshaping the travel-agency business.

“They’re very creative and different, and it challenges the traditional model,” said James Shearer, chief operating officer of TravelMasters in Vancouver, British Columbia.

“Young people want to redefine the space,” said Vanessa McGovern, executive vice president of strategic partnerships and business development for the Global Institute for Travel Entrepreneurs (GIFTE).

To learn more about how young new entrants are reshaping retail travel sales, we spoke with a few well-placed industry members. Here are some ways they said the new generation is approaching an age-old business.

1. Revolutionizing communications.
“Millennials are really changing the way travel agents communicate and opening the eyes of seasoned travel professionals,” said Mike Ertmer, business development manager for MAST Travel Network.

Customers aren’t picking up the phone or even emailing even more; they’re sending messages through Facebook or Tweeting or texting and expecting a reply. “The younger generation is getting more seasoned travel agents into texting their customers and being more available,” said Ertmer, who is vice president of ASTA’s Young Professionals Society (YPS).

2. Flying under the radar.
Young mavericks are giving the sale of travel “a new form,” Shearer said. “Now it’s a niche sales process, rather than a niche market. So you’ve got people running what would be a huge agency, but it’s just them.

“They’re sitting in a pub with a bunch of people who all get together and go off on a trip somewhere. Some of it is so under the radar that unless you’re swimming in that circle you don’t know about it. Someone might be running it out of the basement and working with a small group of friends.”

In the end, it’s a very different way of delivering an age-old product, he said. “It may be a licensed travel agency, but it may have a completely different façade. It’s a very different environment.”

3. Leveraging global connections.
Networking for business has taken on a new and vastly more expansive meaning for today’s young travel professionals, said Heather Kindred, program director for Travel Leaders of Tomorrow.

They’re friends with hundreds if not thousands of people around the globe whom they’ve never met in person. But they have day-to-day interactions on Instagram, Snapchat, Snapchat Stories, YouTube, blogging, live-streaming channels. “What that’s doing is expanding their circle beyond ZIP codes and time zones. It’s hard for us to even imagine how big that is.”

Kindred says she know a woman who started a blog and within the first couple of months had thousands of views. Another started a Twitter account for her company and within four months had more than 9,000 Twitter followers. Now she has a group that wants to do a trip together based on this common theme.

“They can leverage this technology or social media, untap new business and new markets, and really target opportunities the old channels probably wouldn’t reach.”

4. Entering through different doors.
Millennials are joining the travel agency business via nontraditional paths, too.

A lot of young travel bloggers are coming to the industry, bringing SEO skills and good content that attracts people to their blogs, McGovern said. “They’re essentially travel experts with built-in clients, but they don’t realize they can monetize it.”

Another example is in the romance travel niche. “There’s a natural progression: A bride starts working with a travel expert, and she falls in love with the process and wants to become a destination wedding expert,” McGovern said.

5. Redefining marketing.
Young travel professionals are leveraging social media “at a really deep level” to redefine the marketing space, McGovern said. “The digital age has put the marketing power in their hands.”

A young travel seller living in a rural area who wants to specialize in destination weddings, for example, can use Facebook’s Power Editor to create Facebook ads that target people of a certain income level who just switched their status to engaged. “Because of the democratization of marketing, they can talk directly to prospects in very high net worth areas in other parts of the country.”

Young agents are creating entire marketing strategies around Facebook ads, McGovern said. “It can be very affordable, with a very good return on your investment, because it is hyper-focused.”

6. Selling themselves first.
Young travel professionals, even those in traditional agency settings, often bring an entrepreneurial mindset to the role. “Their expectation isn’t necessarily that their work is going to be handed to them,” Kindred noted.

Instead they’re building their own customer base, while cultivating a personal brand, often across a range of social platforms. “If I’m Jack Smith and I’m 25 years old, I might be working for a Travel Leaders office, but I want to be Jack Smith. I want to have a social-media presence that’s not Travel Leaders but that’s me, so I’m the talent and I’m the brand.”

One young aesthetician who’s now selling travel, for example, plans to include branded sunscreen as part of her marketing, because she understands skincare. It’s branding yourself as the product because, quite frankly, that’s what we’re selling.”

7. Ignoring old boundaries.
Young travel professionals are crossing and sometimes erasing all kinds of old boundaries in retail travel sales.

“The good ones don’t see sites like TripAdvisor or Uber as competitors or hampering their business. They see them as complementary tools,” said Stephanie Lee, founder of Host Agency Reviews. “I see younger agents doing more custom trips, mixing in vendors that traditionally don’t work with agents and charging trip-planning fees to make up for lost commissions. Younger people are looking at it as a lifestyle business. They don’t see it as a 9-to-5 job with a distinct line between personal and business.”

That’s well-suited to the flexible work style favored by many young travel professionals. “One of the things they crave most is freedom – this whole laptop lifestyle. They don’t want to be stuck at a desk,” said McGovern.

Young agents often insist on doing it their own way when it comes to product too. Ertmer said he sees young travel sellers super-focused on niches. “You’ve got some doing that now. But the millennial generation is really going to focus on what they love and what they’re passionate about. They’re going to take that to the next level.

“To be honest, I think they might be a little stubborn. They only want to sell what they’re interested in. They don’t necessarily want to know the world; they want to sell what they like,” Ertmer said. “And they’re also ‘YOLOs’ [you only live once] – they’re going to do what they want to do.”