It should come as no surprise that Gina Bang is having some serious impact on Avanti Destinations. It’s as if her name was a literal description of her effect on the Portland, Oregon-based travel wholesaler.
Since she was promoted last January to chief sales and marketing officer, she has expanded, restructured and reignited Avanti’s sales team. She’s been cleaning out the cobwebs of the system and making things run more smoothly.
Ms. Bang has been with Avanti for 21 years. She’s worked all over the company and knows how things work. She has great people skills and has been inspiring the team, which then inspires its respective travel advisor customers in each sales region.
Her overall objective is “to imbed Avanti more into the advisors’ workflows, to be able to have different entry points, to make the quality consistent throughout all our offices and our team, to keep us close to the advisor community, our only source of business.”
She knows the company from the bottom up. She started as a customer service representative, the public face of the company, and a challenging job, as anyone can imagine who has ever called a company in anger or in need. She’s also worked as inside sales manager, product manager, and senior manager of sales and marketing.
Avanti’s CEO Paul Barry recently said, “Gina is one of our longest-tenured employees and thoroughly knows this company, its people, its partners, and products. She has done a wonderful job in every position she has held and is the right person to head up our rapidly expanding sales team, as well as marketing.”
The stage was set for Gina’s revitalization of the sales and marketing organizations by some earlier restructurings made by Paul Barry. Last September, Avanti opened a new office in Manchester, England, and staffed it with 18 new employees to service phone inquiries from its travel advisor customers.
Because Avanti sells strictly through travel advisors, it doesn’t have to handle massive numbers of calls from the public, most of which start from square one in terms of the knowledge of what the caller intends to do. Travel advisors are specialists and their questions are focused, based on a fundamental knowledge of how the travel industry works. That’s how Avanti maintains a tight ship in a global operation that sells travel components to Europe, Latin America, Asia, the South Pacific and Northern Africa. Selling directly to the public is a whole other game, and Avanti’s not interested.
Avanti also streamlines its services by providing a dedicated in-house specialist to any travel advisor who produces $40,000 in annual business.
The new office in Manchester widens the parameters of how Avanti can service its partner advisors. Manchester is one hour later than Greenwich Mean Time, five hours later than New York and eight hours later than Avanti’s home office in Portland, Ore.
“All of our channels work together,” Paul Barry told me. “You can email us, or call us. You can start on the phone, or on email, and take the conversation to another channel.”
Avanti also offers the means of booking totally online. It was one of the first wholesalers back in the 1990s to offer travel advisors (then known as “agents”) the means to book separate components online and assemble their own packages to their own specifications. But Avanti doesn’t want to limit its customers to online interactions, so it tries to meet them on whatever platform on which they approach.
Now with the Manchester office working in coordination with the Portland office eight hours away, the telephone specialists are open for calls 6 a.m to 8 p.m. New York time and 3 a.m. to 5 p.m. on the West Coast. The website, through which most business can be conducted, is of course open around the clock.
A Changing Industry
The travel industry has always been a rapidly changing one, and that is as true today as ever. Gina is adapting the sales and marketing operation to the changes that are taking place in the industry at large.
“There’s so much happening in advisor space,” she said. “Our team needs to be there to support them. More advisors are going independent. That means they are wearing all the hats.”
With the extra workload of being independent, it can lead to some tasks slipping through the cracks.
“People tend to do either the highest priority or easiest thing first,” she said. “If a client is calling and wants to book something, you tend to book things that are easy to book. If it’s something they’re not comfortable with, an advisor may say, ‘I’ll get to it tomorrow.’ All your to-dos become tomorrows instead of todays.”
Avanti is trying to lower the barriers to booking FIT. Sales support is key. If an advisor is trying to book a complex itinerary in an area they have limited experience in, an Avanti in-house specialist who is intimate with the destination can make things go much more efficiently and produce a more reliable result.
Outside of Boundaries
The travel industry is a haven for people whose existence cannot be contained within conventional categories, who can’t tolerate the confinement of the standard office world. Gina Bang is one of those people. Through her personal experience she brings a unique perspective to her job. She has an inherently global perspective, because her frame of reference spreads far beyond the standard office world.
Of Korean descent, she was born on an island, Kodiak Island. “I grew up in an Alaskan fishing community,” she told me. “The first time saw a farm animal was when I went to Europe. Kodiak Island is a wild place, in general. My parents still live there. I visit every summer.”
She left when she was 15. She had that wandering urge.
“In high school I did a year abroad in Denmark,” she said. “I left Alaska kind of shy, then came home very outspoken and very extroverted. My mother said, ‘What happened to you?’ It was just all those opportunities to travel. I traveled all over Europe by myself.”
It was a cultural collision. Europe was nothing like what she had grown up with. Her background gave her a kind of objectivity.
“I grew up at the edge of nowhere,” she said. “It was funny to be in Europe where everything is so connected. Every bit of ground was spoken for. I grew up in the exact opposite. The first time I saw a fence was when I went to school in Portland.”
She attended Lewis and Clark University, studying political science and international studies, “heavily influenced by my time abroad,” she said. “When I came back I was looking for the soonest I could leave again. I ended up leaving the day of graduation. I had a late flight because that’s when I started interning for my senator in D.C.”
She liked Washington D.C. and stayed on, did a semester at George Washington University, worked for some nonprofits. Then she returned to Portland.
“I wanted to stay in Portland permanently,” she said. “I was looking for a job. I thought, ‘What skills do I have that will help me in a career path?’”
She took a job in Portland working for Multnomah County.
“I really didn’t like it,” she said. “I saw all my co-workers there. They looked very drained and not enjoying what they were doing. I felt like I needed to try something else. I don’t want to be one of these unhappy people. So, what do I love to do? I love to travel. I love talking to people. I saw an ad for Avanti, so I took this job. I thought it was going to be temporary. I said I would do this for six months and then figure out what my next step is. And I never left.”
For that, Avanti and its network of travel advisors and suppliers are fortunate. She’s made a tangible difference in many lives. Avanti’s Big Bang is generating a benign tsunami of business.
David Cogswell is a freelance writer working remotely, from wherever he is at the moment. Born at the dead center of the United States during the last century, he has been incessantly moving and exploring for decades. His articles have appeared in the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, Fortune, Fox News, Luxury Travel Magazine, Travel Weekly, Travel Market Report, Travel Agent Magazine, TravelPulse.com, Quirkycruise.com, and other publications. He is the author of four books and a contributor to several others. He was last seen somewhere in the Northeast US.
