An agent on our travelhub community has posted about bringing in a £15 refundable service fee on tailor-made enquiries.
It's by no means the first time I've heard an independent agent talk about this. The principle, obviously, is to discourage customers from using the agent as a free research tool then booking direct.
Let's assume this went ahead, and other indies followed suit. Would that be an agent equivalent of News International charging for online content?
The backgrounds are wildly different, but there are two common pressure points:
> How do you differentiate yourself enough to justify charging for your information?
> How do you show people that you're different when the difference is behind a barrier?
Agents could miss out on sales if they do this. The quote is not just a service - it's also a sales pitch. I had an agent put together a quote on an itinerary in New Zealand for my honeymoon. I happened to mention that I was also considering Tahiti so the agent took the initiative to put together a quote on Tahiti as well. That impressed me. I think the fees would really be to protect the agent if I used that as free research and then tried to book either NZ or Tahiti directly. Whereas the only reason I didn't book with the agent is because we end up having a one-destination holiday in another region not covered by the agent.
I think customers should have the privilege of comparing prices. That's only natural.
The idea of offering your customers a choice of either blindly accepting your offer with no due diligence on their part, or paying you £15 for the honour of having you pitch to them is a pretty short sighted business model.
Agents need to continue looking for new ways to add value and reach new customers, not whine about healthy competition from the Internet.
Just to be clear - the suggestion is £15 for a professionally produced quote on tailored itins, not £15 on the door for a standard consultation.
Caitlin - interesting example. I read that as a criticism of the idea's practical dimension, rather than John's rejection of the principle. I've had agents suggest a first itin free, with a charge thereafter, which may be more sensible.
Caitlin, Did you book the holiday with another agent or did you book it directly on the internet? I find it hard to believe that the agent did not have access to a certain region, A specialist Tour operator may not have access to many countries but travel agents have access to hundreds of Tour operators and they will always find someone to offer you a holiday of your choice.
I agree with John that the customers should have the privelage to compare prices and they should not be held to ransome. Now an agent has spent time and efforts and it involves costs i.e. telephone calls, other overheads etc. so who is going to pay the travel agent for working for a tailormade itinerary days on end and then changing the dates and starting all over agin. Nothing in life is free. We have gotten used to free information on the internet but in order to get access to the internet, you are still paying for your broadband connection.
Before computers, you had to go to the library and do the research. Which meant using your time now if you are using an agent's time to get some information that is freeloading.
If it is proper itinerary and the customer is serious to book a holiday then I do not see why travel agent and the customer can not work together which means changing the itinerary if and when required.
But Imozy, where does it stop? I work for a wholesaler that sells to agents, we dont charge for you to put together an itinerary as a quote. In fact, we give very lenient cancellation deadlines. Would it be fair if we were to charge just to use the service/inventory? There are a ridiculous amount of bookings that are made but auto cancel because no one paid for them. For us thats valuable allotment gone and we dont make a cent, so we would be justified.
But why would you put another hurdle up for consumers to come to you anyway?
@Nathan I'm not sure if I'm rejecting the principle or its practical application. Aren't the two intrinsically linked? If you want to be hard-line about it, agent's itineraries are really just sales pitches. In any other field of business, companies only earn money when they close the sale. (The individual salesperson may earn a retainer but the company relies on closing sales).
Charging a fee for a quote would reduce the work that agents have to do, but it would also reduce their business. I rarely use travel agents now and that would drop to zero if I had to pay for a quote. Charging for a second itinerary is somewhat better but it still wouldn't solve the fundamental problem of people using the first itinerary as a blueprint to book direct. It also opens the door to agent hopping.
@Iamozy What the agent quoted on and what I booked were fundamentally different propositions. I asked them not to include flights to and from the country in the price because I was comfortable booking that myself and I had frequent flyer points to use.
The agent's quote on New Zealand involved several hotels and inns, car hire, a couple of day tours and three or four internal flights. It was a complicated itinerary and drew on the agent's specialist knowledge.
Our actual honeymoon was in the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. We used Qantas frequent flyer points to get from Sydney to Queensland. We then stayed with one resort operator on two different nearby islands. I booked that directly through the resort, which was offering fantastic deals on its website. I didn't hear about this through the agent - it was purely from my own research, and it was a very simple itinerary. Plus, I'm actually from Australia and the agent was British and didn't claim to specialise in the Barrier Reef.
@caitlin yes, principle vs practical is too abstract. real question was whether 'first quote free' makes a difference, which you've answered.
my take on it is still basically an anti-paywall argument - you will struggle make your point of differentiation count if you build a barrier around it, especially when you're competing with a medium where the tendency is to remove barriers.
With the exception of multiples, how many Tour operators have shops? They rely on internet or travel agent. Internet is a fantastic tool but I am sure that you must have read about "bait and switch" Tour operators. The agents provide a service to sell a product for the wholesaler in return for commission. The agents advertise on behalf of the wholesaler to sell their product and when things go wrong become the intermediary. The agent does not put the customer on hold for over an hour and the agent deals with the aftermath of any complaints. Our average 10% commission goes towards salaries, advertising, Consortia payments, overheads etc. We can not add margins unless we are dynamically packaging but even then you need to be ethically in line with the reasonable margins. The purpose of the fee is not to charge for the itinerary but for the travel agents time if the customer was just looking for information or
Graham, I think you are forgetting the basic reason for the idea. The purpose of the fee is not making money but to stop people using travel agents as information bureau. I hope that you are not suggesting that because we sell a wholesaler’s product, our time belongs to the wholesalers. All inclusive holiday for £150 to Turkey may be profitable to a wholesaler, if they exist in the first place but spending a whole day trying to find that elusive holiday is a waste of time. So is spending time on creating long haul itineraries with agreement of the potential customer which means that it could take days and a lot of premium number telephone calls to the Tour operators.
The fee could be for first consultation only and not for repeat customers. It just proves their commitment.
@Caitlin. I am surprised at the travel agent to provide you an itinerary that did not fulfil your requirements. I would ask exactly what the customer need, how flexible they are, what their budget is and ask questions about their lifestyle to the level where i need to know how tall they are to find the right airline for proper seat pitch etc. Being an ozy, did you really need a travel agent, you are internet savvy, and could you not have used the internet to get information.
In olden days good customer services were the norm not an exception, how many times people have to have their fingers burnt and how many surveys later before we recognise that customer services cost money. If people are happy to book on internet then they should not go to travel agents and if they have issues with internet then I am sure that they would be more than happy to use internet to complain because most of the time you may not get access to the supplier to even complain.
How many times do the customers read terms and conditions on the internet? I had to explain travel insurance policy on more than one occasion on what is covered or not covered. How many travel agents that you go to, explain that or draw your attention to the errata, even though they know that they could lose business so yes a good honest travel agent is worth every penny.
I think you may have missed my point. I understand what you are saying, your time is important and you're not a free resource to be used and tossed for internet bookings. I posed your idea to a few people who normally book holidays on both methods and they were all adamant that they would just not bother if they had to pay for an agents time, they'd book online.
The general trend these days for both offline and online sales has been the elimination of fees. I wrote something about this on my site, Zuji Australia have dropped their booking fees and most OTA's in America did quite some time ago. This is just my opinion, but there are a lot of things an agent can do that the internet cant and I think we should focus developing those services and adding value to a booking rather than another form of punishment.
@Iamozy I think you have misunderstood. The agent did what was asked of him, which was to provide a suggested itinerary for New Zealand. They did this very well and had New Zealand been my final choice, they would have got my business. However, at this point I was not fully committed to a final destination. The agent was fully aware of this - unlike you, they seemed well aware that this was a sales pitch on their part.
You are correct that I did not need a travel agent for the simple holiday in Australia, which is precisely why I did not use a travel agent for this! However, I would have benefited from a travel agent for the complex itinerary in New Zealand, which is why I consulted with the agent over this.
It would have been unethical for me to take the information on New Zealand provided by the agent and then piece together a DIY holiday using their recommendations. However, it is in no way unethical for me to decide not to take that holiday and to do something else instead. Nor was it unethical for me to request the quote in the first place. I wasn't wasting anyone's time - the holiday was under serious consideration, but I needed more detail to make a decision.
Your business is not customer service. Your business is sales and good customer service is a tool to help you achieve sales and repeat business.
Any kind of fee would be the death knell for your business. In the case of my holiday there was probably a 50/50 chance that we might have chosen the NZ holiday and earned commission for the travel agent. However, if a fee had been on the table, then I wouldn't have asked for the quote and the agent's chance of earning money would be reduced to 0%.
As an owner of a second home in France which we let to holidaymakers, it was interesting for once to step over the fence separating venue owner and agent, to discover the same, or similar issues being discussed. I can appreciate how difficult this situation is for travel agents. Can’t say I have personally wasted a travel agent’s time in the ways described but can well imagine it happening. Public access to the internet nowadays sounds as if it could be an increasing handicap to the guys on the high street. But there will always be a place for both independent travel and planning and booking your holiday through an agent.
Good will and showing you care about your customer have always been important, but vital to your success in a competitive market. It’s a question, in the agent’s case, of knowing where to draw the line in terms of time invested, and there’s the difficulty. However to draw the line even before you have built the trust of your customer, by setting a charge for the service, is surely counterproductive?
Mmm, difficult. I’m happy to do whatever it takes to secure a booking, and returning guests, and I actively enjoy this part of the process - answering their questions, talking them through how to get to the property, exploring their interests and giving them links to relevant information etc. However, in terms of scale and potential cost, this doesn’t require quite the same amount of effort as putting together an elaborate itinerary for someone.
Caitlin. You hit the nail on the head when you stated that it would not be ethical to use an agent for information and then DIY your own holiday. That is precisely what is happening. Nine out of ten customers have been doing exactly the same. How do I know it? Because as part of the customer services, I ring them to see if I could do anything else to help them or if they require any changes in the itinerary. More Often than not, they have either booked it on the internet directly or they would only book a holiday if I tell them which tour operator or which Airline. Whereas I have already discussed in detail if they had any preferences about airlines or they would rather not fly with a certain air line or a Tour Operator.
A customer told me recently that in order to get the lowest prices, she gets written quotes and plays the travel agents against each other. A lot of companies are going bust because they feel compelled to make a sale and discount heavily, I am not inclined to do so. Neither do I wish to take responsibility of another travel agency going bust. If a customer has already got a quote, I will only discount if it is directly from a Tour Operator, hence I can eat into my own commission only if it is a repeat sale or it is reasonable amount to discount. The Tour Operator is still getting the same price without discounting and is selling a holiday through a travel agent. We forget that as more businesses close, the more people are on benefits and the more working people have to pay. It is an ethical dilemma which majority of customers overlook. I have stopped providing written quotes when someone is asking a printout after they have got the pricing, the hotel, the destination and the flights times according to their wishes. Because, the prices are fluid and I do not wish another travel agent forced into giving huge discounts to compete with my pricing.
With regard to charging a fee, I do not charge a fee for simple enquiries, neither do I charge for repeat customers. The suggestion is based on my personal judgement if someone is committed to book a holiday sometime in future or they are just asking for information because they do not have time to sit on the internet to find information about a complicated itinerary without any regard for the travel agent's time and efforts and if that kind of customer is not willing to agree to a service charge agreement which require a nominal fee for the time spent on creating that itinerary then frankly, I do not need that kind of customer. I have repeat customers who come to me for customer services as I not only find the right holiday at the right prices but deal with everything including online check in on behalf of customers without charging any fee. I will take my customers to the airport when needed without charging them anything. Once they have made a booking, I will do research for any enquiries that they may have about the resorts, excursions, local roads, maps, anything they need. I put myself in their shoes and understand where they are coming from. That is customer service and that is why they come back. For me this is the end of the debate. It has been interesting to see different viewpoints from some tour operators and members of public. Someone needed to speak on behalf of the travel agents.
I think you are forgetting the basic reason for the idea. The purpose of the fee is not making money but to stop people using travel agents as information bureau. I hope that you are not suggesting that because we sell a wholesaler’s product, our time belongs to the wholesalers.The fee could be for first consultation only and not for repeat customers. It just proves their commitment.
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