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President Obama's comments suggesting that travel agents are obsolete ("When was the last time somebody ... used a travel agent instead of just going online?") was a poor example used to make the reasonable, if not self-evident, point that technology and automation replace jobs that can be replaced by technology and automation.
The belief that automation will make travel agents, specifically, obsolete, is not exactly new either. It was the operating assumption in many of the travel technology conferences I attended throughout the 1990s (and beyond).
Following the president's comments, industry associations and groups rose to travel agents' defense, pointing out that they were alive and well.
You probably picked up all this last week. What you might have missed were two blog posts suggesting that the president was correct in choosing travel agents to make his point.
One was posted by Kevin May, the respected editor of Tnooz, a travel website that focuses on technology and digital distribution.
Last Wednesday, he posted a blog titled "Reality check: Barack Obama is right about offline travel agencies," in which he says that the president "is a long way from saying agents are dead," but that ASTA, which wrote a response to the president highlighting that there are still 120,000 travel agents paying taxes, is in some respects "trying to pick a fight it cannot win, because Obama is actually right."
May's post, which concludes with the words, "You decide," is followed by a number of responses, some suggesting that the OTA community has been endorsed and vindicated by the president, others adding statistical references that appear to support their points.
On another website, my colleague Jay Boehmer, a Business Travel News reporter whose work I admire, posted a blog titled "Obama wasn't wrong." (BTN, like Travel Weekly, is owned by Northstar Travel Media.)
In it, he questioned ASTA's 120,000 figure, pointing out that the number was taken from a 2007 census and includes all employees of travel agencies, not just travel agents. He also noted that the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics estimated that the number was 70,930 in May 2010, down 43% from 124,030 in 2000.
Boehmer notes that today's travel agents are "knowledgeable, consultative service providers" and "lifelines" who "ease disruption for road warriors, create memories for vacationers and serve customers in ways computers cannot."
But, he concludes, "There are far fewer of them than there were. ...Obama seems to get that, while the associations that represent travel agents ... ignore it."
The problem with a lot of these statistics, from ASTA's to Boehmer's to those of May's responders, is that while each can support the argument they appear to be making, they're ultimately just points in isolation of context and ignore a larger truth.
It's hard to believe, for example, that the Bureau of Labor Statistics data includes home-based travel agents, who number in the tens of thousands and represent an important step in the evolution of travel agents.
But back to the ignored, larger truth. It is this: There is no longer a pronounced online-offline distinction among sellers of travel. Although the perception lingers that there are two distinct camps, there is more evidence of convergence than of polarity.
Many travel agencies that consider themselves OTAs employ hundreds of live travel consultants in call centers whose job is to speak to buyers who began a transaction online, then decided they needed to speak with a human being to complete the process.
And many agents and agencies that might still consider themselves "brick-and-mortar" or "traditional" have significant business coming in from the Web.
How much business? Let's consider the cruise industry, which is co-dependent with leisure travel agents. The amount of bookings a cruise line gets from agents varies from line to line, but using public statements cruise lines have made, it would appear that "traditional" agents represent about 75% of all cruise bookings.
But where do these agents find their clients? I recently went into some detail about this with a senior cruise line executive. When analyzing how cruise-selling agents market cruises, the exec said that up to two-thirds of these "traditional" agency bookings began with an agency website or sophisticated Web marketing or social media efforts.
Although some of these agents actually take bookings directly on the Web, the majority ask potential clients to fill out a Web form, which they follow up with a call from an agent. Or they simply ask visitors on their site to call a toll-free number for details.
ARTA's response to the president, which came relatively late in the news cycle, focused on agents' "embrace of technology," and painted a rather robust image of today's agent as supported by technology and using the Web effectively.
Even home-based agents, whose sales volumes are typically less than those of traditional agents, often access very sophisticated technology and benefit from Web marketing via host agencies.
Avoya, No. 37 on Travel Weekly's 2011 Power List, is a host that has been named "agency of the year" by every major cruise line. It markets exclusively on the Web and feeds leads to its associated home-based agents.
Perhaps it's not the travel agent profession, but industry terminology that is obsolete. In many ways, a convergence between offline and online operations has already occurred and lends support to the larger point the president was awkwardly trying to make.
In the new norm, the important differences among agencies relates not to online/offline, but rather to size, product focus and sophistication of technology.
These distinctions are important. But the "online/offline" distinction is fast becoming irrelevant. And focusing on it leads many smart people to waste time arguing points that are, in fact, pointless.
Let's move on.
Email Arnie Weissmann at [email protected] and follow him on Twitter.