It’s a busy time for travel advisors—perhaps the busiest in history. Everyone is trying to manage their time and balance their obligations. Given this environment, we asked travel advisers if the time they spend on industry advisory boards is still worth the effort. Not surprisingly, the answer came back: that depends on the travel advisor and the board on which they sit.
Lori Foster of Luxury Travel Associates/Dream Vacations in San Clemente, CA is one of about 10 travel advisors on Outrigger Hotels’ Southern California Advisory Council. Over the past five years, the group has met three or four times a year and twice traveled to visit Outrigger properties.
Before each meeting Outrigger sends a list of topics it wants to discuss, “things the company is looking for answers to, or wants to hear our opinions about,” and asks what its staff can do to help travel advisors increase sales, what property or room category they recommend most often, what they see happening at Outrigger properties and in the market.
“We talk about a little of everything,” Foster says. “They are trying to help us sell and we are trying to help them improve.”
The last site visit, to Hawaii in September, was planned to give travel advisors an early look at the renovations taking place at the Kona property. From Foster’s perspective, it was an invaluable chance to see the new Voyager 47 Club level, so she can better describe it first-hand to her luxury customer base.
She was impressed with its beautiful new suites and its packages that include private yacht and helicopter tours, which Outrigger wants to position as a luxury product.
“It’s great to give them feedback on what my luxury clients like. Some of their new suites are oceanfront at the Reef and at Waikiki Beach; they are just gorgeous and the views are spectacular. I think my luxury clients would like them,” she says.
She’s also a member of the Orange County Prost, a travel industry networking group that includes advisors, hotels, resorts, tour operators and airlines. These groups are “a way to make the contacts and relationships you need to be successful. When I moved to California from New York 12 years ago, I found these connections so helpful to my business—plus they have the benefit of great friendships over the years,” she says. Today, she’s president of the group.
“Certainly, it’s worth my time,” she says. “As advisors, we need to be involved, and being on boards is a way to give back. Instead of just complaining, for us to tell suppliers what we like and what is working well is very valuable for both sides.”
But not every board is created equal, and not every one is worth a travel advisor’s time.
Over many years in the travel industry, former agency owner Iris Citron, who’s currently director of leisure travel at Alice Travel Worldwide in New Jersey, has sat on many advisory boards, including TWA, Eastern and PanAm airlines; Isram World of Travel; Hertz Rent-A-Car; and The Bahamas Ministry of Tourism. Of them all, she says, the most rewarding was The Bahamas.
“It was the best board I’ve ever been on because they really listened,” she says. “All the others existed because they felt they had to; they never listened to a thing anyone had to say. The Hertz board, for example, included my travel agency, which was over $40 million in corporate business at the time, and the others were equally large. I think they chose me because I was well known in New Jersey and my agency was well known, and I was very active in ASTA. But they never instituted any of our suggestions.”
Still, Citron says, “it certainly was worth my time anyway. It gave additional status to the agency and it also gave us perks, and the suppliers did things for me personally. Our customers were 75% corporate, so it also helped very much when I had to do a presentation to a potential client that I sat on these boards and they would do things for me.” For the leisure agents, it delivered “lots of fam trips—and they gave us miles and gold cards, they upgraded our elite status, those kinds of things.”
The Islands of the Bahamas was the best, though, largely thanks to Vincent Vanderpool Wallace. “It was a magnificently run board,” Citron says. “They would bring us down for three or four days with our spouses, and there was never a time when I couldn’t get anything I needed from them, because they really appreciated the effort everyone put in coming to those meetings. But the beauty was that they really listened. We told them the airport bathrooms were horrendous; you need to clean up and modernize them. And they did it within a year. And I knew that if I had a client who did not get what they needed or wanted or paid for, if I couldn’t get it resolved myself in 15 minutes, they could get it resolved in five.”
Philip Archer, owner of Roaming Richly Travel, agrees that choosing your boards wisely is key. He felt the input of travel advisors was not taken seriously on the Cruise Planners Franchise and LGBT Advisory Boards, but is taking another chance and joining a committee of the WESTA Travel Consortium.
Indeed, even if not all suppliers are listening carefully to travel advisors, hotels, resorts and destinations seem to be. At Karisma, for example, a new advisory board called the Compass Committee launched this month, Cesar Briceno told TRO. They will have quarterly online meetings and an annual on-site. When the company invited travel advisors to apply for the 12 positions, more than 200 applications came in.
“We are not necessarily looking for top producers; we are looking for people who want to teach,” Briceno said. “We are looking for a commitment to help grow the business. It’s about how we can be more supportive of the travel advisor community and answer any questions they have.”
Sherrie Funk, principal at CSF Travel Consulting, agrees that advisory boards are only as good as the organization behind them. She has served on boards at Vacation.com, Travel Leaders Network, and a cruise line.
Lots of agents see serving on a board as a status symbol or a social occasion when they are a lot of work, she notes. “Yes, there are cocktail parties and nice hotel stays, but the consortia community, especially, is now holding meetings at airport hotels. And sitting in a meeting room for eight hours a day for a couple of days is exhausting; a lot of information is disseminated in a short period of time and discussions carry over into dinners.”
Her advice to anyone wanting to serve on an advisory board? “Learn to leave your agency outside the door when you enter the meeting, and look at the good of the entire membership or agency community rather than just your own agency. Also, you have to speak up. You have been asked to be on an advisory board to advise, not be a ‘yes’ man who just rubber stamps anything brought forward,” she says.
CCRA vice president Margie Jordan, meanwhile, sits on a different kind of board—Northstar’s Black Travel Advisory Board, formed three years ago with the goal of fostering a more inclusive travel industry.
“What I’ve loved is that we’ve had difficult conversations about diversity, like ensuring diversity is represented in all aspects, from the stage to black perspectives in articles and in representation in photographs. We’ve questioned why we see so few Black executives and BDMs in this industry,” Jordan says.
Originally, the group met once a month; now it meets quarterly—but its work is beginning to show promise; CruiseWorld now has its own Black Travel Advisory Board, for example. When she recently had a group that felt it experienced bigotry from other passengers on an MSC cruise, “the only reason I was able to meet with MSC was because of Arnie (Weissmann) and Bob (Sullivan) at Northstar; they reached out to the president of MSC USA and he agreed to meet with me and a couple of the board members. At one time we would have just let things like this go and said nothing—if not for the Black Travel Advisory Board, it would be swept under the rug. But now MSC is considering forming its own Advisory Board of diverse members.”
For Jordan, even after many years in the industry, sitting on the Board has been a positive personal experience as well. “I’ve made a lot of great contacts in the industry. And meeting so many other black executives has opened the door to relationships and friendships I wouldn’t have had otherwise. I feel like I have allies I can go to and resolve situations,” she says.
And for travel advisors who are not in executive positions, or are new to the industry, joining a board “absolutely is going to open doors,” she said. “One of the most valuable things travel advisors have is their contact list. That list is gold to you.”
Cheryl’s 40-year career in journalism is bookended by roles in the travel industry, including Executive Editor of Business Travel News in the 1990s, and recently, Editor in Chief of Travel Market Report and admin of Cheryl Rosen’s Group for Travel Professionals, a news and support group on Facebook. As an independent contractor since retiring from the 9-to-5 to travel more, she has written regular articles about the life and business of travel agents for Luxury Travel Advisor, Travel Agent, and Insider Travel Report. She also writes and edits for professional publications in the financial services, business, and technology sectors.
