President's Message
Every day, millions of traveling consumers around the world make a simple decision: Will they use a travel agent, or book their own trip?

Are You Worth the Extra Money?
By OSSN President Gary Fee

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Christopher Elliott -- a well-known travel expert with a nationally syndicated newspaper column – regularly recommends that his readers use a competent travel agent when they plan trips. But, in a recent posting on his blog, he talks about the experiences of one of his readers who doesn’t agree with that advice.

”You give an impression about travel agencies that I just have not found to be true,” the reader says. He tells the story of how agents he’s used in the past have fallen short of his expectations. For example, one agent failed to help him with using his airline frequent flyer miles to upgrade to first class. The same agent also apparently didn’t put his hotel frequent-guest program number into the reservations, so he’s still fighting with the hotel chain for credit on his stays.

We may quibble over the details – e.g., many of us don’t like handling frequent flyer upgrades – but the principle remains the same. Do we offer what Chris Elliott calls “the go-the-extra-mile service” that consumers expect these days?

Before you answer that question, take a look at Chris’ post (linked above). Don’t read just the post itself – scroll down and scan through the 30-plus comments that other readers left on his site. You’ll see a few common threads in what they’re saying: Agents sometimes don’t deliver what they’ve promised, they don’t do anything more than travelers could do on their own, and they may not know as much about a destination or a trip arrangement as the consumer does.

Here’s a short list of lessons I can take away from this situation:

We should take a long, hard look at the service we promise to deliver to our clients. Yes, it’s easy to put on our Web sites “We take care of all your travel needs,” and it’s easy to promise that when we talk to clients in person or on the phone. But, if we’re truly not set up to do that – e.g., if we’re not equipped in our home offices to handle frequent flyer upgrades – we shouldn’t promise it. In many cases, consumers will understand if we explain why we don’t handle certain travel tasks. Many home-based agents don’t deal with air reservations, for example, and as long as our clients know this upfront, they won’t expect us to handle their air bookings later. The key is not promising more than we can deliver.

We should step “outside the box” and see how our clients view us. We may think we’re doing a great job with customer service, but how do we know that? It pays to have a frank discussion with a handful of our longtime clients, asking them where we can improve what we do for them. We can also send email or printed surveys (or use services like SurveyMonkey.com) to poll our customers about things we can change to serve their needs in a better way.

We should plan ahead for the growing trend towards specialization. All of us who operate full-service home-based travel businesses know that it’s growing more difficult these days – almost impossible, to be honest – for us to know more than our clients know about every destination and every type of trip that’s sold today. Among your friends, and in your own neighborhood, you may continue serving as the one-stop shop for travel if that’s the foundation for your sales. But, it may pay to think ahead about niches in which you can begin growing your expertise, so that you can diversify your business down the road.

Got comments about this article? Send them to me at info@ossn.com!

Gary M. Fee is president and founder of the Outside Sales Support Network, the world's largest trade organization devoted to home-based sellers of travel. OSSN serves more than 7,500 home-based travel agents around North America.

(Credit: OSSN)