Effective advocacy is crucial for any industry, and for the travel agency community, it’s especially important. Travel advisors have faced unprecedented challenges in recent years, after all. But they have a valuable partner in the American Society of Travel Advisors (ASTA), which advocates for agencies on multiple levels.
Among the current issues ASTA is addressing are FAA reauthorization and the New Distribution Capability (NDC) launch by American Airlines, both of which can have a major effect on how travel agencies do business. To make sure that agency interests are heard, ASTA members and leaders will travel to Washington, D.C. next month for the Society’s annual Legislative Day. The day includes training as well as meetings with legislators.
ASTA officials note the effectiveness of their efforts by looking back at 2022, when one of the issues they discussed with legislators, a 10-year travel and tourism strategy called the Visit America Act, became law.
“We’re travel advisor evangelists,” said David Bowman, ASTA’S vice president of membership, noting that the organization also works to promote the travel agency industry to the general public. “We tell the travel advisors’ story across multiple consumer media platforms, helping consumers understand why they need the help of a travel advisor for all their travel needs. In 2022 alone, ASTA’s efforts earned more than 70 million dollars’ worth of consumer media exposure for travel and travel advisors.”
Those efforts have helped reach a wide audience, according to Bowman. “We told the travel advisor story through dozens of mainstream media outlets, including Good Morning America, the New York Times, CNN, Consumer Reports, MSN, the Boston Globe, USA Today, NBC, the Wall Street Journal, and many more.”
ASTA advocates for travel advisors in Washington DC (Photo Credit: ASTA)
Encouraging Growth
ASTA also conducts studies and helps agencies to stay on top of a fast-moving marketplace, notes Bowman. “Our industry relations department conducts regular surveys to track and report on consumer demand for travel,” he explained. “In our latest research, we asked what respondents were spending their discretionary income on. The top response was travel, with 47 percent listing travel as their number one discretionary purchase, followed by home improvements with 23 percent and new computers with 10 percent. When asking specifically about leisure travel, 63 percent of consumers surveyed said they have travel plans between now and the end of the year, with 30 percent saying they planned to travel internationally.”
So how is ASTA helping travel advisors to meet this increased demand?
“Travel destinations and other providers of travel experiences recognize the importance of travel advisors in securing new business and growing their bottom line, and they know there’s currently a shortage of travel advisors, so they want to help,” Bowman said. “To that end, Norwegian Cruise Lines recently provided ASTA with $250,000 in seed money to help us create and market our Future Travel Professionals program, designed to attract and educate people from all career fields and backgrounds on the benefits of a career as a travel advisor.”
The response to that effort has been impressive, he says. “To date, more than 1,000 people have downloaded our free information on what it’s like to be a travel advisor, and many have subsequently signed up for our Roadmap to Becoming a Travel Advisor course, which will provide them with the basic knowledge and information to begin a career as a travel advisor.”
The benefits of taking the course are, indeed, enticing for people interested in entering the travel agency community. “Included in the package is one year of ASTA membership as a Future Travel Professional member, and access to our Travel Business Opportunity Center, where they can post their resumes and connect with potential agency employers,” Bowman said. “They can also choose to focus on starting their own, independent travel business, or to explore employment as a corporate travel advisor—we provide distinct training modules to help them learn the particulars of each of these segments of the business.”
ASTA also advocates for travel agencies by helping to connect travel advisors with new business.
“We’re also capitalizing on the increased demand for leisure travel and using social media and other digital platforms to drive customers to our travel advisor members,” Bowman said. “Our Trip Quote program is a web-based resource where consumers can enter the parameters for their dream vacation into a database. ASTA travel advisor members can then access that information through our Consumer Leads platform and connect with those potential customers. Launched recently, we’ve seen activity on this site increase exponentially with even small-scale social media and digital promotions.”
The organization’s advocacy work is funded in part by ASTA’S annual Advocacy Dinner, which this year took place during the ASTA Global Convention in San Juan, Puerto Rico and raised more than $325,000 for advocacy and policy efforts.
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