What’s the State of Travel Agencies and Advisors in 2024?

The most important TMR Outlook of the year is now live, just in time for the kick-off to 2024.

The team at TMR today is excited to release the 2024 Distribution Outlook, an inside look at what’s happening inside the travel trade. The survey, which was answered by close to 900 advisors in North America, was undertaken in December 2023 with questions, and answers, geared toward operations in 2024.

The questions were focused on how agencies and advisors found success when it came to what they sold, what they made commission on, their affiliations with hosts and consortia (including fees paid), communicating with clients, and more. Generally, how advisors ran their business, and what was the motivation behind the decisions they made.

The full survey is available on the TMR website, but some of the bigger findings included:

• Close to half (49%) of all advisors are affiliated with a host agency and just 7% have no affiliation with hosts or consortium. A majority of advisors chose their host based on referrals from colleagues or friends, and a majority paid somewhere between $100 and $500 in annual fees to the host agency, with 14% paying more than $1,000.
• Half (50%) of all advisors charge a fee and another 14% plan to. A lot of that growth has come in just the last two years—22% of all advisors charging fees told TMR they adopted the practice something during 2022 or 2023.
• Customer support and call center operations are driving advisors’ selection of suppliers. A higher percentage of advisors (75%) said that customer support or call center operations are the factor in determining a selection of supplier than whether or not it suits a client’s needs (71%), or whether or not it’s part of their consortium or host agency network (51%).

Advisors can access the full results here. Past surveys, including the latest survey on river cruising and last summer’s report on European travel, can all be accessed on TMR’s Training homepage.