Travel Company Finds its Own Way to Recruit and Train New Talent

Tourico Holidays has come up with its own answer to what it—and many in the travel industry—see as the lack of talented young candidates for jobs in travel.

This year Tourico launched its own travel school—the Tourico Holidays Travel Academy—to recruit and train promising students for positions with the company.

Based in Orlando, Fla. with offices around the world, Tourico is a global business to business wholesale travel distribution company that contracts directly with hotels, cruise lines, attractions, ground transportation. It brokers this inventory to more than 4,500 clients in 100 countries.

“All businesses struggle with recruitment so that’s one issue,” said Neil Emerson, Tourico’s senior vice president of global product development. “We also wanted to have a systematic approach to finding the right caliber of people and train and educate them in our business segment.”

Lack of awareness
Beyond the usual challenges in recruiting talent, Tourico was faced with students’ lack of awareness, not only of its business, but of the travel industry in general.

“What we were finding when going out to different schools and universities was usually that students are not aware of opportunities in travel,” Emerson said.

“The travel business is fragmented,” Emerson added, which accounts for that gap in awareness. “It’s kind of a new industry; it’s evolving.

“They [students] are aware of hotels and cruise lines but our business segment is like an unknown,” he said.

Major investment
Launched in this past January, the Academy accepts 30 applicants for 10-week sessions. It conducts four sessions a year.

With an annual budget of $2.5 million, the Academy is a major investment for Tourico, Emerson said.

The company provides students with room and board at its Orlando headquarters and pays them a ‘”basic salary” of $500 a week during their training.

Classes are taught by executives, travel professionals, and guest professors in a dedicated office space and breakout rooms. Upon completion, graduates interview for positions in several areas including product development, sales, marketing and operations.

Although jobs are not guaranteed, Emerson said the majority of students who graduated this year were offered positions.

Recruiting talent
Tourico visits schools and universities in the U.S. and abroad to recruit students for the Academy. The demographic is 22- to 32-year-olds who have a college degree although the Academy does make exceptions.

“We’re recruiting for our particular space, not for the travel industry as a whole,” Emerson said.

However, as graduates of the Tourico Academy, students may eventually go into jobs in other areas of travel.

“We’re bringing an awareness and a career opportunity, hopefully with Tourico, but it’s also a great way to get them into the travel industry,” Emerson said. “And then they might go into other areas [in the industry].”

A new education model?
Emerson called the Tourico Academy a new business model for industry education although other businesses—like the hotel industry—have similar programs to recruit and train applicants.

Is this kind of company-sponsored private education then, the wave of the future? And could it be a model for travel agencies to recruit and train new staff?

“It depends on the size of the company and the objective as to what they are hiring people to do,” said Emerson.

“We saw that we needed a consistent pipeline of people to grow the business so this was a way to solve that,” he added.

“You can’t ignite growth without people.”

Emerson called today’s pool of travel agents “quite unique.”

“I’m impressed with them because they are really high caliber concierges for people who don’t have the time or the patience to deal with the internet,” he said.