There's a new app on the horizon. Lola, brought to us by the minds behind Kayak, promises to revolutionize the travel booking business. Stop the presses! No, dismantle the presses!
This "new" idea has all the requisite buzzwords behind it like "high-touch meets high tech," which simply means the Lola crew is marrying the ease of online travel sites with the reality that people still want the expertise and human interaction that travel agents provide.
Welcome to the party, Lola. The travel agent industry is already way ahead of you here. Recognizing the marriage has been the key to turning possible extinction into evolution over the past decade.
And now, travel agents are back. Hallelujah. We once were lost, but now, we're found. Was blind, but now we see.
It's a theme we constantly push here at TravelPulse, but since the day I began, I have wondered, "Well, where did they go?"
Yes, we've seen the volume of brick-and-mortar travel agency locations shrink, but as a consumer before I began working in the travel industry, I don't recall any kind of official funeral to mark the death of the travel agent.
Truth is, online travel agencies came along and systematically and unforgivingly steamrolled the establishment. The marketing push was so effective at a time when our country was transfixed on this new thing called the Internet that OTAs became the only story when it came to booking travel.
"Everything you need is online. Cut out the middle man." We know this to be a fallacy, but when you let a perception take hold, it becomes the new reality. And when it came to booking travel, the narrative grew like a virus: Traditional travel agents are dead.
The obit has been written a hundred different ways, largely by newspaper reporters working in an industry that became the model for how not to evolve. I worked in newspapers during the Internet boom. I was in the high-level meetings where I heard executives yammer on about losing their cushy bonuses, how the staples like car dealers and real estate companies had abandoned them. What I never heard was a logical attempt at evolving the product.
The travel agent industry has been much more proactive. To be fair, I have met plenty of the old guard who have a comfortable Rolodex full of tech-averse contemporaries and are content to use computers just enough until they retire. And I can't say I blame them. When you've weathered decades and generations of change, you have earned the right to snub the latest and greatest trend and bypass the "Millennials! Millennials! MILLENNIALS!" hubbub and rigmarole.
The vast majority of agents we've profiled or met through the years are constantly evolving their business. Whether it's finding new clients or learning about better techniques to service and maintain their existing clientele, I have found agents to be more open to training and learning than just any profession I've come across in my 25 years of reporting.
They have honed their craft and their business model, become lean in numbers when needed and prepared themselves for the shift in tides that only seemed logical the more we saw OTAs become inundated with reviewers and opinion.
It has been a tough hit on the ledgers to ride out, but the best agents let their curious clients explore the OTAs, knowing that the information overload and knowledge deficit of the Internet travel world would lead the clients back to the human touch.
To get you to click and get us more traffic, I am supposed to tell you that Lola is different, a game changer for the industry. Sorry, I can't do it.
If anything, Lola is an acknowledgment from the tech world that everything can't become automated. But I'm also not going to tell you to dismiss what this new platform brings to the table.
Use this as a wake-up call, a gut-check moment for you and your business.
Have you considered a subscription model for your agency? Charging a set monthly price to give your clients constant access and unlimited trip bookings? That's really all Lola is. You'll still make all the same commissions, but you add a new revenue stream simply by giving premium access to your knowledge.
Are you using Skype to communicate with clients? Are you texting them? Have you thought about using Periscope when you're on a fam trip to give potential clients a first-hand view of their next vacation?
Travel agents are back. They never left. Likewise, tech is here to stay and it's not the Big Bad Wolf.
The days of fearing anything online is over. Home-based and brick-and-mortar travel agents will continue to thrive simply by embracing the communication convenience that technology can provide.
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