I almost hate to put this in writing for fear of jinxing good fortune by calling attention to it, but after almost 20 years, it appears that travel agents/advisers/counselors/specialists are full participants in what can definitely be called a new Golden Age of Travel.
The statistical lead-up to this declaration has been solid and significant: The industry has been outpacing global gross domestic product for several years running, with no indications of a slowdown. The number of travelers crossing borders passed the 1 billion threshold two years ago, and the compounding inherent in a steady rate of growth points to 1.8 billion international travelers by 2030.
And now comes statistical backup in our annual Travel Industry Survey that travel agents are feeling the lift in ways that recall the agent boom that peaked in the early 1990s, when just about anyone who hung a shingle out their door proclaiming they sold travel had a good shot at profit.
The differences between then and now, of course, are significant. In 1994, a doctor's spouse could be set up as a travel agent and be heavily enough subsidized by air commissions from friends and family travel that he or she could break even.
Today's successful leisure travel adviser is valued for expertise rather than simply for the ability to book, and happily that is proving to be a more satisfying, profitable and sticky model.
Among other notable stats, the number of agents who in this year's survey reported a decrease in business has fallen to a modern-day low: 9% vs. 80% in 2008.
But if you dig a little deeper, you see two separate data points that suggest that the Golden Age is not universally uplifting. On one hand, there is evidence that the long-term trend toward moving to a home-based business continues unabated: 55% of survey respondents identified themselves as home-based in 2015, up from 52% in 2014.
But the data also suggest that the common belief that size is important in business is true. Not surprisingly, home-based agencies report lower gross sales than agencies that employ multiple advisers in offices, phone banks or storefronts. But looking back even to the years when the recession was still impacting sales, one finds that average annual home-agent sales are falling: They were $414,000 in 2011 but only $328,000 in this year's survey. In fact, in this year's survey, a full 25% of home-based agents had gross dollar sales of less than $25,000, compared with 18% the prior year.
This could be seen as an ominous shadow, especially when looking at which agents reported a decrease in sales in this year's survey: It is retail agencies with the lowest-grossing sales figures that stand out. Virtually half the travel businesses that indicated sales went down year over year grossed under $1 million. But not one agency reporting sales grossing more than $15 million reported a decrease.
Is there a silver-lining interpretation that can be applied to this and give hope to smaller, home-based agencies?
Actually, there is. The decrease in average bookings could be due, in part, to the influx of home-based agents attracted to a growing industry and just getting started. I wrote earlier this year that I no longer worried about the industry attracting new, young talent, because in the history of commerce there hasn't been a single instance where an industry performing above average hasn't been attractive to entrepreneurs or those seeking a job.
The bottom line: I stand by my belief that this is the new Golden Age of Travel, one in which retailers will continue to benefit. It doesn't matter much whether one self-identifies as a travel agent (a label that more retailers identify with this year than last), travel adviser, travel counselor or travel specialist; the 2015 Travel Weekly Travel Industry Survey suggests that this is a very good year to be selling travel.