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Agent Provocateur
ChrisCrossings · April 20, 2000

Q: You write about the travel industry and by your own admission, you've not spent much time in a retail location. When agents try to enlighten you, you twist their words to your liking.

I have been in the travel industry since 1979. I've been a front line retail agent, corporate travel manager, leisure agency manager, cruise line account manager and worked at a hotel and ran charter boats in the Virgin Islands.

Sure, I've met some loser agents who give all of us a bad name. By far they are in the minority, and the commission caps are weeding them out, very effectively, I might add.

You seem to want to paint us all with the same broad brush. When an honest agent writes about fam trips: "Does it affect what I offer my client? I don't believe so. I definitely make an effort to check out the companies that I can get benefits from booking, but I also check out those who do not, and if they are offering something better then that's what my client gets. Free trips can influence your decisions only in that it increases your confidence in the product, or not," you ignore that most agents are honest and objective and you presume to tell us what we do: "What happens when you're trying to please the airline, hotel or cruise line? You steer your clients to a given itinerary not because it's good for them, but because it's good for you. Common sense tells you that you're pointing your customer in the wrong direction, try as hard as you might to justify your position."

The vast majority of agents are objective. If I go on a familiarization trip, and find the product sub-par, my clients benefit, don't they? If I go on a fam, and find the product terrific, my clients benefit, don't they?

It is not the supplier who benefits as much as my clients. I ask the clients what they want, I listen to them and based on my experience and knowledge, offer them three alternatives for them to choose from.

I guess I take offense that you don't seem to listen to the responses your columns generate, you just try to convince us that we're all a bunch of cows being herded by "them."

- Russ Charette

A: Thanks for your letter, Russ. I respect your opinion and that of the many other travel professionals who wrote in last week to express similar feelings.

But before I respond to your question, I'd like to apologize - no, not for my controversial opinion, but rather for filing last week's column even though I was suffering from a high fever and flu. In the process, I allowed numerous typographical errors to slip into the final version of the story, for which there's no excuse. I also slammed my former employer in a most unprofessional way, calling it the "Gulag of travel journalism" - something I'm not very proud of. I should have taken the week off and stayed in bed.

You are absolutely correct when you point out that I have never been a travel agent. I haven't. But do I need to be a travel agent in order to understand the travel industry? I covered the stock market for two years without having ever traded a single share. Does that mean I don't understand the way Wall Street works? Do I need to have a pilot's license to effectively cover the airline industry?

I agree that it would help, which is why I've accepted an invitation by a local travel agency to spend a day watching its employees at work. This is no publicity stunt; I honestly hope to gain a better insight into what you, and your colleagues, do.

I also agree that commission caps are weeding out the bad agents. I think that's one benefit of the cuts - the other being that the reductions are saving airlines a lot of money.

I beg to differ with your final point. I read every response to my column and I try to answer each one personally. When I include a letter in a column, I often have to tighten it up (you'll notice the disclaimer below each issue) but I always try to preserve the point that the writer is trying to make.

In your case, your assertion that I'm trying to persuade travel agents that they're "all a bunch of cows being herded by 'them'" couldn't be any further from the truth.

I believe that many well-meaning and honest travel retailers try to convince themselves that taking a familiarization trip doesn't leave them with an obligation to the supplier. However, as a consumer and as someone who has covered the travel industry for more than a decade, I'm not so certain. I've received numerous e-mails from travel agents who were perhaps a little too honest with me. They admitted that the only reason they became travel professionals was to take those "free trips."

Suppliers surely know how valued a fam trip invitation is, and they can - and do - use these incentives as leverage. I base this observation on interviews that I've conducted with suppliers. And off-the-record, they'll all tell you the same thing: If agents don't "produce" they'll be overlooked when the next round of fam trip invitations go out.

I don't presume to tell you how to do your job. Rather, my responsibility is to the consumer reading this column. Don't you think that it helps for a traveler to be aware of the system of familiarization trips and other incentives that agents get? Wouldn't that allow them to ask more intelligent questions when they buy travel? Isn't it useful to know how retailers get compensated - the way in which commissions, overrides and other bonuses can affect the advice a traveler is getting?

Russ, if you care as much about the traveler as I do - and I believe that you do - then you should support any effort to help customers understand how the system works. That means that we debate the issues politely and thoughtfully in a public forum instead of trying to keep travelers in the dark about a very complex and often flawed travel distribution system.

Christopher Elliott's column appears on Thursdays. All e-mailed questions to ChrisCrossings become property of Ticked.com and may be edited, condensed or republished at the site's discretion. You may reach Elliott at chris@ticked.com. Or visit his home page at http://www.elliott.org.