PHOTO: Outrigger Resorts offers the Outrigger Expert Agent program.

Home-based travel agents have certainly had to put up with a lot throughout the years. They have been respected, disrespected and, then, respected again.

But home-based travel agents (we’ll call them HBTAs for short) have survived the ebb and flow of the industry regardless.

In fact, these days, HBTAs are riding the wave, instead of hoping it doesn’t crash down upon them. Increasing numbers of hospitality companies are recognizing the importance of HBTAs, and ensuring that they are serviced better in the process. In turn, HBTAs are returning the favor.

The wheel goes ’round and ’round, and everybody wins.

Of course, some hospitality companies value the HBTA more than others do. You can go on and on about how much you value the HBTA, but if you don’t show it through your communication channels and your agent programs, it doesn’t really matter what you say.

For the 10th anniversary of Agent@Home magazine, we talked with several hotel and resort companies well respected by the agent community to find out what they had to say about the value of HBTAs today, what specific abilities HBTAs bring to the table, and what programs they offer to agents.

Representative from these companies included Chris Austin, vice president of global leisure and luxury sales at Starwood Hotels & Resorts; Kevin Froemming, executive vice president and chief marketing officer, Playa Hotels & Resorts; Patrick Mitchell, vice president of sales and marketing, North America, Club Med; Ash Tembe, vice president of global field sales for Hard Rock’s All Inclusive Collection; and John Limper, vice president of sales and marketing, Hawaii/Guam, for Outrigger Enterprises Group.

Here is their take on the relationship between travel agents and the hotel and resort industry:

The Evolution

The words “respect” and “technology” came up frequently during Agent@Home’s talks with hotel companies.

According to Froemming, “There’s a much broader respect for at-home agents. [Increasingly] people are recognizing them as being very valuable pieces of the distribution channel. There’s a greater understanding of what they do.”

“It used to be more difficult for hotels and suppliers to reach out to home-based agents, but now you see suppliers attending home-based trade events more and more,” Tembe said. “Most hotels and resorts now also offer a dedicated support system via telephone lines and agent portals/websites.”

“Home-based agents are a rising trend,” Tembe added. “Many agencies have gone home-based and are extremely successful. They invest their overhead in marketing and selling vs. physical property, and we get a lot of our business from them—some of our top accounts are home based.”

Starwood now even refers to the travel agent as the “travel professional,” specifically because the company wants to communicate that respect, Austin noted.

There was a time when many HBTAs may have felt cast to the side or deprioritized, but, interestingly enough, as technology has taken off, it hasn’t led to the devaluing of real live human beings: It has actually led to HBTAs being more appreciated.

“Technology, of course, has been the big enabler aided by the imperative to manage operating costs,” Mitchell said. “The tools and services provided by host agencies, consortia and travel franchise organizations have allowed both traditional brick-and-mortar travel agents as well as entrepreneurs to build very successful travel businesses from their home.”

Added Limper, “Travel agents have fully embraced new technologies and service consumers through both specialized, professional travel distribution technology that is not available to consumers, as well as Internet-based tools. For many consumers who have national if not global networks supported by social media and the Internet, having a trusted advisor just a phone call, Skype or Facetime away works just great.”

In turn, hospitality companies have not only recognized agents’ focus on technology as the years have gone by, but they have also used this very technology to better communicate with travel professionals and service them more effectively.

“Engaging with home-based travel advisors is not just a good idea; as a supplier, it’s necessary to grow your business,” Limper said.

In this sense, HBTAs and other types of agents have greatly helped their case by accepting the changing technological landscape. Instead of resisting it, HBTAs have learned about it. It’s a major factor in why they not only have survived within the ever-changing travel industry, but also are beginning to thrive.

If intelligence is measured by the ability to adapt, then HBTAs are mighty smart individuals. They have worked their way through some extremely tough years to be greatly valued again, aided by their recognition and warm embrace of changes in the industry and the world.

The Advantages

Technology isn’t the only thing that HBTAs have adapted to, they have also found a new way to control costs, deciding, for example, not to work in a standard brick-and-mortar office anymore. (Can’t say for sure, but a lot of them have probably watched “Office Space”.)

The days of staring at the destination you are selling to your client through a computer screen are over. HBTAs have kicked down the cubicle’s constraining walls and are actually traveling to the destination itself. HBTAs have become known for being agile and mobile, which only goes hand in hand with, you know, the travel industry.

“Once agents come down and see a property and actually get to experience it, they are very effective sellers,” Froemming said. “From that standpoint, I think a lot of home-based agents are very mobile. They aren’t stuck in an office. They’re seeing customers. They’re going out and conducting business while they’re at a destination. And I think that’s a major change.”

Added Tembe, “Top-producing, home-based agents for us usually specialize in a certain aspect of the market – they hone in on a few products and know them really well. In our case, they specialize in all-inclusive hotels and resorts throughout the Caribbean and Mexico.”

HBTAs also travel around in their hometown, a practice that has its benefits.

“Beyond the sheer size, home-based travel advisors are an extension of my sales organization,” Mitchell said. “They reach current and potential customers in their hometowns and beyond. They are efficient marketers, the best of whom leverage the great support they get from their host or consortia. Home-based advisors bring us multigenerational family groups and meeting and incentive programs from local companies.”

Of course, when HBTAs aren’t constantly moving, they are working at home, within the walls they want to work in. Working at your home also has its advantages.

“One of the upsides of the home office is that [agents] can use their time very wisely,” Austin said. “There are perhaps less distractions. You just think of our lives. You’d probably like fewer distractions on occasion.”

“A lot of people understand that (working at home) improves the quality of their work,” he added.

PHOTO: Club Med has a dedicated team working with host agencies and consortia.

The Challenges

Of course, working at home and away from a centralized office can have its disadvantages.

For one, when you don’t have suppliers and clients constantly moving through the door like at a main office, you have to take it upon yourself to get out there and build connections. It generally takes more work to get in front of suppliers and clients when you are working from home.

“Home-based travel professionals don’t have the interaction with the suppliers as if they were sitting in a New York office on Park Avenue,” Austin said. “I think all home-based professionals must understand that they have a responsibility to reach out to their preferred suppliers.”

Austin said some HBTAs don’t even clearly identify where they’re located, or at least their respective host agencies or consortia don’t make that known. Without that information, suppliers like Starwood sometimes find it difficult to service them as well as they would like.

“We encourage home-based agents to attend as many home-based trade events as possible,” Tembe added. “Also, agents should not hesitate to reach out to the suppliers they want to work with, because they do have support structures in place for agents.”

In fact, every supplier that Agent@Home talked with urged agents to reach out to them if they needed help, at times clearly indicating that it wasn’t done enough. As HBTAs, agents have a great deal of control in how they operate. That can be a drawback if they don’t realize there are certain things they need to do to get noticed.

Programs and Initiatives

It’s safe to say Starwood, Outrigger, Playa Hotels & Resorts and Club Med place a strong emphasis on servicing the home-based agent and the travel agent in general.

Playa Hotels & Resorts, for example, gave agents a free trip to upcoming operated properties Hyatt Ziva Rose Hall, Hyatt Zilara Rose Hall and Hyatt Ziva Puerto Vallarta. The company set aside 150 complimentary rooms for agents (25 percent of them home-based) so they could actually experience the properties before they opened later this year and in Fall 2015. Top-producing agents (many of them home-based) recently won a trip to Los Cabos.

Playa Hotels & Resorts invests millions of dollars in educating agents, through everything from fam trips to webinars to tradeshows. Given that Playa is unique in that it implements its marketing strategy directly through agents, the company depends on agents to get the word out and effectively sell its properties.

Starwood’s Pro Learning curriculum has been wildly popular. The first module of the curriculum focuses on each of Starwood’s nine brands and teaches agents how to correctly match clients up with certain brands. There are also destination-specific modules through Pro Learning. Agents write a small story of a destination within these modules, then pass their stories along to their clients. “It teaches the art of storytelling or, as we like to call it, story selling,” Austin said.

Starwood also teaches upselling techniques. For example, the company generally advises agents to recommend pre- and post-cruise trips of three nights or longer. “When a travel professional sells one night, they’re selling convenience. When they sell three nights, they’re selling an experience,” Austin said.

Club Med has a dedicated team of Business Development Managers (BDMs) who work closely with host agencies and consortia. Club Med’s BDMs have become preferred suppliers to some major formerly cruise-only franchise organizations that have been looking to broaden their scope.

The launch of the Club Med Expert Agent certification program in 2012 was a strong signal to agents that the company valued the agent community. That was followed by Club Med’s Great Agent Awards program, where agents can win free nights based on high performance. On top of that, Club Med’s BDMs host a variety of fam trips and educational seminars each year.

Outrigger Resorts has the Outrigger Expert Agent program, a point-based incentive program. The program includes updated property maps and information, exclusive specials, complimentary client welcome amenities, invitations to special events, fam trips and more. Outrigger also focuses on providing excellent support to the agent community, highlighted by a central call center it dubs a “one-stop reservation call portal.”

Hard Rock’s All-Inclusive Collection sports a website dedicated to travel agents called www.allinagents.com, as well as a support line and an inside sales line.