Jamie Biesiada
Diana Hnatov, director of sales and services at Kore Travel Education,
described the travel agency landscape like this, at least through the
lens of training and education: "Kind of like the Wild West."
Hnatov
joined Kore, owned by American Marketing Group, about a year and a half
ago. While her career started in hospitality, before Kore, she spent a
number of years in training. Specifically, she was focused on training
and development for IT professionals, including soft and leadership
skills.
When she entered the travel agency community, Hnatov
found herself surprised by the fact that just about anyone can become an
advisor.
"There is no standard. It's really interesting, and I
didn't realize this when I first joined that there were no standards for
becoming a travel advisor," she said. "There are no licenses in the
U.S., with the exception of a few states."
She also noticed that there wasn't one single program used to train new advisors.
With Kore, she hopes to change that.
It's no coincidence that I've been writing about advisor training a lot (last week in this space, I featured Wanderlust Campus' AI bots that act like clients, great sales skills practice for advisors).
Advisor
training has become a hot topic in the agency community. With the
influx of new advisors that have joined in recent years, it's something
that is on most minds. How do you ensure the next generation of advisors
is well trained, especially when there's no set way of becoming a
travel advisor?
To keep that conversation going, I plan to
periodically use this space to highlight different programs, educators
and training techniques.
While there are inherent benefits to
having a low barrier of entry into the industry, the idea of having
untrained "advisors" ruining the trade's hard-fought reputation as
trained pros is concerning.
"There's so many risks," Hnatov said.
"No. 1 is the reputation of your agency. That is No. 1. They can bring
you down in seconds."
A new advisor who has failed at booking
something could lose an agency a client, she said. There are also some
legal ramifications, especially when it comes to security around client
data and sensitive information. And while AI is becoming a common tool
for advisors, the users still need to carefully fact check its work.
Even the simple act of clicking a link in an email could have disastrous results if it's a malicious phishing attempt.
"That's a huge, huge exposure for that agency," Hnatov said.
The
solution is training. But for many agency owners, she said, the biggest
barrier is cost. It's not necessarily something they want to pay for,
but it's an investment that is worth it, she said.
If an advisor
isn't properly trained, an agency could end up cycling through new agent
after new agent because, not making commission, they get frustrated and
leave.
"Training is one of the most valuable things you could
possibly do in any agency, in any corporation, quite frankly, because
it's an investment in your company," she said.
It also tamps down the possibility of bad behavior by teaching the proper methods from the get-go.
Since
she joined Kore, Hnatov has put the course's content into a new
learning management system that enables people to adjust it to how they
would like to learn (for instance, content can be narrated for someone
to listen to on a walk).
It's available to any agency and is fully customizable.
Hnatov
is currently in the process of working with several colleges to
incorporate Kore into their workforce development programs.
"In
speaking with these colleges, much of the response was, 'Wow, I didn't
know this, and if I had, I probably wouldn't be an administrator in a
college. I'd love to be a travel advisor,'" she said with a laugh.
It's a growing industry, and she's found colleges receptive to offering it as a prospective career to students.
Going forward, she's looking to strike more partnerships within the industry to incorporate even more training into Kore.
"If
we don't do those partnerships, what's going to happen is, then we're
not supporting the entire industry. We're just supporting us," Hnatov
said. "We need to support the industry in order to make us successful."
Correction: Kore is not a new program. A previous version of the Insight had an incorrect headline.