NEW YORK — The travel agency community is in the midst of experiencing a "golden age," Travel Leaders Network (TLN) executives said Tuesday during a media briefing at the Ritz-Carlton New York, Nomad.
"I think we are in a renaissance of the travel advisor in terms of the distribution channel," said John Lovell, president of Travel Leaders Group.
Lovell attributed that largely to favorable public sentiment about advisors and an uptick in advisor use. Consumers are demanding three things, Lovell said: "validation, confirmation and affirmation," as well as a person to help them if there is trouble over the course of their travels.
Roger Block, president of TLN, agreed. Block started in the travel industry in 1980, which he described as the golden age of the growth of brick-and-mortar travel agencies. They started to decline after the airline commission cuts of the 1990s.
But agencies are on the uptick again. Some are brick-and-mortar agencies, he said, but many are emerging thanks to the benefits and lack of overhead of virtual work, Block said. More and more people are joining the industry.
"That, to me, is what is turning this into a golden age of travel advisors," Block said.
TLN is part of Travel Leaders Group, a division of Internova Travel Group.
2024 looking strong
Thanks at least in part to that strong public sentiment, TLN is turning the corner from 2023-2024 with strong bookings.
"We have never seen booking patterns and strength on the books as we turn the year as we do now," Lovell said.
Land bookings are up 10% compared with the same period last year. Specifically, touring and FIT trips are up 14%; fun and sun, 3%; and theme parks, 16%. Parks are a particular bright spot, Lovell said, as that segment represents "billions and billions of dollars" of bookings.
Cruising is also up 10%, with some segments trending significantly higher: Contemporary cruise bookings are up 40%; premium, 31%; luxury, 19%; and river, 35%.
Cruise inventory for the next seven to eight months is "getting really tight," Lovell said, noting consumers are increasingly booking with advisors instead of direct or online.
"We are anticipating a very, very strong 2024," Lovell said.
He did acknowledge that it's a U.S. presidential election year, which has in the past caused a bit of a slowdown in the late third and early fourth quarters. But Lovell said that with demand as it is, he believes consumers might be shifting away from that downward trend.
Member growth
Block said TLN enjoyed its best year in 2023 by just about every metric, be it profitability, growth, member profitability or something else.
"You name a metric, 2023 was outstanding," he said. "And what's even better is 2024 is looking in all those metrics as good as 2023 if not better."
In 2023, TLN added 300 new members in the U.S. and 42 in Canada.
In addition to bringing size and scale — one of those new agencies was InteleTravel — Block said they are also bringing new ideas and energy to the network. They also added $275 million in preferred supplier sales and around $635 million in overall sales.
A talent problem
There is one major hurdle facing both agency networks like TLN and agencies themselves, Lovell said: finding the amount of talent necessary.
"We need more people," he said. "We need talent coming into the industry and backfilling for the people who want to retire and move on."
To help train that talent, TLN has upped its available educational resources. In 2023, TLN facilitated 133 supplier webinars, up from 60 in 2022, and increased the TLN Training Library from 300 trainings to 1,305 trainings, among other offerings.