The Travel Institute has been educating the retail travel industry for nearly half a century. Travel Weekly's Kate Rice interviewed Jack Mannix, chairman of the Travel Institute, about what's new and what remains the same as it approaches its 50th anniversary next year.
Q: What is the Institute's mission?
A: The mission is still pretty much what it's always been, and that is to provide education and certification for travel industry professionals. What has changed, of course, is how we do that. We're doing things completely differently than what we used to.
Q: What are some examples?
A: Probably the biggest thing I could point to is the whole online learning side. A couple of years ago, we took about six months to migrate to a learning platform with 600 different courses on it, not just about travel but general business courses like how to polish your selling skills in 30 minutes. We have changed to meet the need of agents today. If they need to know something right now about X, they don't have to study for a year. That online learning platform is called Communiversity.
Q: What's another big change?
A: Our membership has also changed. We had a regularly annualized membership program, which we still have. But we also have the Communiversity concept. Basically you can buy a monthly membership. The price is $19.95. So if you want to be a member for a month while you take a couple of these courses, you can do that. That gives them some flexibility. It allows them to more surgically go in and get the training and information. The majority sill have the regular full-blown annual membership as opposed to surgically parachuting in and learning something. People who are serious about it tend to take more than one course.
Q: So how has the way agents access you changed?
A: As the industry has shrunk compared to what it was 15 years ago, membership numbers are smaller. But we also have a lot of people who buy the destination specialist or lifestyle specialist course or other courses. Today membership is really just a chunk of what we do. The number of transactions far exceeds the number of members. We are in the business of selling education certification programs, but people are making purchases without actually becoming a member.
Q: What's selling?
A: The CTC was the backbone of the original Travel Institute. It used to be people who would meet once a week in a physical group. While we still have the CTC, it's not the biggest seller as it once was. The lifestyle and destination specialist programs sell quite well and quite briskly. That is not surprising. They are not general overall management courses; they are very specific to a destination or a lifestyle. And that is a function of agents today. Smart agents are looking to have a specialty so they have a depth of knowledge in a destination that the customer is looking for.
Q: What kind of agent takes your programs?
A: We still have people who complete their CTC program every year. We have people starting out in the industry with the TripKit program, have a lot of second-career people working part-time. One thing that agents need to be way better at is the business side, not just the destination side. They need to be better marketers and better salespeople. From the technology standpoint, we've got our Geek School. The next one is about to start. It's about blogging and how to use WordPress. There's a whole bunch of stuff that we are doing to meet the industry's various needs.
Follow Kate Rice on Twitter @krtravelweekly.