True-False?

bout 5% of work-at-home travel agents sell more than $1 million a year.

The correct answer (and, yes, it's true) is in the May 19 print edition of Travel Weekly, in the middle of a cornucopia of information about home-based travel sellers. The image of the housefrau in shaggy slippers doing the laundry with a cell phone clipped to her bathrobe may never fade away entirely, but the reality that emerges from our research is that travel professionals who work at home are doing exactly that: working.

Some work full-time; some work part-time. Some have other sources of income. Some aspire to evolve into a brick-and-mortar environment. Some are easing into retirement and taking the opportunity to do what they like, where they like.

Some, however, still feel stigmatized by supplier ambivalence about the home-based channel.

A new and increasingly important challenge for this industry in the next few years will be to eliminate that stigma as the industry restructures and stratifies.

For years, you could pretty much take for granted the willingness of travel suppliers to service accounts across the entire spectrum of distribution channels. That led, in turn, to freedom of choice for consumers.

And that's worth keeping.

• • •

Dare we say it?

n its latest quarterly travel forecast, the Travel Industry Association made bold to use the word "upturn" and to suggest that we may be seeing the "the beginning of a recovery for the airline industry."

For this summer, the TIA projects 2.5% more leisure trips than last summer, and a 1% increase in air travel.

More significantly, the TIA said the shift in consumer preferences away from commercial carriers and toward close-to-home driving trips "may not be as exaggerated as we saw last year," possibly reflecting a "gradual return" to previous travel patterns.

In a recent poll of its associate agencies, Carlson Wagonlit reported that two-thirds are showing an increase in bookings, with 20% calling the increase "significant."

And while the SARS scare has seriously affected airline travel on Asia-Pacific routes, the Air Transport Association recently reported that traffic in other markets "is beginning to come back following the end of the war in Iraq."

And as we report in our news pages today, corporate travel agencies report that business travel is beginning to rebound to prewar levels.

This doesn't quite add up to a reason to celebrate, particularly since the bombings in Riyadh last week have reminded us that the war against terrorism is far from over. Still, we could be looking at the beginning of a turnaround.

That would be good. Now would be a good time.