Agent@Home Magazine - September 2009
Travel Tech
The Virtual Agency
By Kate Rice
Home-based agents use technology and entrepreneurial energy to succeed
Late in 1995, in a hotel conference center in Toronto, a shaggy-haired Microsoft project manager named Erik Blachford told a room full of hotel executives attending a HEDNA (Hotel Electronic Distribution Network Association) conference that Microsoft was getting into the online travel business.
Preview Travel, originally part of AOL, then an online monolith, was already in business. Even before Blachford, who ultimately became CEO of Expedia, casually dropped his bomb on hotel executives, pundits were predicting that the Internet spelled the end for travel agents. Microsoft’s entry surely sealed their doom.
But the pundits were wrong. The Internet would not destroy travel agents. Instead, it would free them from the green screens and cryptic codes of the GDS terminals that kept them chained to their desks, and provide an entree to the rewards—and the risks—of entrepreneurship in a virtual world. Travel agents could work for themselves and profit from their own energy and drive in a way that would have been impossible until the advent of the Internet.
Today, agents at home are a powerful and growing distribution channel. Expedia itself is now in the home-based channel, operating Expedia Cruise Ship Centers. Sabre, parent company of Travelocity, acquired the host agency Nexion in 2003.
When Blachford said that Microsoft was entering online travel, the foundations of the old retail travel model were crumbling. It had been a comfortable and extremely lucrative one, with airline commissions generating the bulk of agency revenues. But in February 1995, Delta Air Lines, moving to cut distribution costs now that the Internet had given it a new way to sell directly to consumers, had capped commissions. That led to the ultimate destruction of the old economic model.
The path home
To most agents in 1995, the Internet was The Enemy. But a few saw the opportunity. Joanne Gardner, owner of The Travel Specialist, and ASTA Midwest chapter president, began working from home 20 years ago. She used CompuServe to dial into the office and access the GDS. It was a dedicated GDS terminal; no one else could use it if she were on it.
Gardner booked air and hotels over the GDS and called suppliers to book vacation packages and cruises. She still had to go into the office to get her faxes and to collect all of her tickets. And, she didn’t have the institutional “brain” of the office to tap into—she couldn’t confer with a colleague at the next desk.
But the social networking capabilities of the Internet were already evident, says Scott Ahlsmith, CTC, chairman of The Travel Institute and executive vice president, global technology, for Virtuoso. CompuServe’s “forums” or chat rooms had already started buzzing. Early adopters like Ahlsmith were already on email; agents like Gardner began using email to replace those water cooler conversations about travel products. The virtual world was in its infancy, and it was cumbersome. Dial-up access was slow and frustrating; early tools were limited in what they could do. But the travel industry began adapting.
Tools like Worldspan Go!, a browser-based solution that came out in 1999, effectively gave agents access to all the same GDS tools. Easy Sabre also enabled remote access. Amadeus introduced Amadeus Cruise, a non-GDS, business-to-business booking tool for booking cruises. Not only did you not need to work from an office to use Amadeus Cruise, but you also didn’t even need a GDS contract—a huge breakthrough for home-based agents who didn’t want to deal with three- to five-year GDS contracts and meeting booking thresholds. Revelex, which aggregated GDS content as well as web content, also gave agents GDS access without a contract.
Suppliers embraced the Internet as well. Cruise lines and tour operators sold complex products and had proprietary and idiosyncratic technology platforms (particularly, at that time, on the tour operator side). Integrating their technology platforms with those of the GDS—which had, after all, been built to sell airline tickets, relatively simple products—was time-consuming, difficult and expensive. The web offered them a new medium better suited to present their products to agents as well as to consumers. Carnival’s BookCCL.com came out in 1999. Polar Online came out in 2004.
But perhaps the biggest game changer when it came to selling leisure was Vax VacationAccess, now powering GDS leisure tools such as Sabre Vacations, Amadeus’ Vacation Link and VacationsSelect by TravelPort.
Launched in 2000, VAX VacationAccess first offered all of the The Mark Travel Corporation’s brands, then and now the biggest tour operator in the U.S. VAX began as a web version of the old GDS green screen, but quickly branched out from Mark Travel’s brands to others and added cruise lines, starting with a direct connect to Carnival Cruise Lines. It began powering Amadeus North America AgentNet and Vacation.com. In 2005, it introduced dynamic packaging and live vacation inventory. In 2008, it added a hotel-only booking engine and vacation rentals, this year it added VAX Adventure in partnership with AdventureLink.
In the late 1990s, companies like Online Agency and Passport Online gave agencies the ability to have their own consumer-facing websites, sites that let them feature their preferred suppliers. Franchises, host agencies, consortia and other marketing associations now offer these capabilities to their members. Agents could be operational 24/7, just like the big guys.
E-tickets and e-documents cut the time it used to take to get customers their travel documents, simplifying and shortening the fulfillment process.
New ways to (net)work
Agents’ strong point had always been their relationships with their customers. One-to-one marketing was hard-wired into the brick-and-mortar model. But the new online world meant doing business with people from outside your neighborhood, people you weren’t going to meet in the grocery store. Welcome customer relationship management (CRM); ClientBase and WinCruise were early, travel-specific players that remain today. Consortia and host agencies provide their members with these or proprietary systems.
The web did two other things for home-based agents: It gave them a new way to network, not just with their fellow agents, but also with consumers, and it gave the groups that provided agents with support—host agencies and, today, consortia and franchises—a new way to access that support.
Host agencies and consortia found that the web gave them a new way to deliver all those support services to home-based entrepreneurs. Rather than utilizing fax and email, host agencies, consortia and franchises can post news and specials on their intranets. These forums can give agents all the tools they need—information, marketing, education and training, back-office functions, booking tools, customer relationship management programs—in one place: on their computer. Host agencies are integrating all of these functions to simplify running a business for home-based agents, freeing them up to sell travel and make money.
Hosts and other entities also use the web to access the institutional knowledge of their colleagues in host agency forums such as Nexion’s Nexion Town, a peer-to-peer networking site. Agents trade information and news in online forums such as longtime home-based agent standard-bearers including the Outside Sales Support Network (www.ossn.com), the National Association of Career Travel Agents (www.nacta.com), the new Home Based Agent Travel Community (www.hbtacommunity.com) and others.
Facebook, Twitter and other general-interest social networking sites are giving home-based agents new ways to connect with consumers with travel on their mind. Agents can tap into ready-made groups or use these sites to establish their credibility as travel experts with these consumers.
This is an arena that continues to develop. The travel-centric social networking site Travel Tribe (www.traveltribe.com), sister company of Performance Media Group, the publisher of Agent@Home magazine, is a place where consumers, suppliers, destinations and travel agents meet. Agents can use the site to establish their expertise and as a forum where they can meet consumers who have travel top of mind.
Online training
In an era in which agents’ value to their customers is their expertise, education is more important than ever. Thanks to webinars, teleconferencing and innovations such as Performance Media’s Virtual Travel Expos (VirtualTravelEvents.com) and Virtual Travel Seminars (www.VirtualTravelSeminars.com), education is more accessible than ever. The beauty of the web means that agents can “attend” a live webinar without having to travel. But, if their schedule and the webinar conflict, agents can still attend it on demand.
Similarly, Virtual Travel Expos are available live, for two days, with the opportunity to “talk” to suppliers and other agents. But the expos remain available for three months. Host agencies, consortia and suppliers all have libraries of educational and training content available to travel agents today.
Cell phones and PDAs such as iPhones and BlackBerrys mean that agents can stay accessible by phone or email around the clock and around the world. Agents can even make some bookings on iPhones.
Technology is breaking down the divisions between home-based and storefront. Increasingly, technology platforms don’t know or care where their user-agents happen to be based. A new model is emerging: the virtual agency. And home-based agents, using technology and their own entrepreneurial drive, are leading the way. @
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