Comment by Jeremy Skidmore: ‘Time for agents to take control’
I expect 2003 will be seen as the year when agents really start to take control of their own future.
Most people expect it will be a very tough 12 months, but often those are the conditions you need to sort out important issues.
Inevitably, some retailers will go out of business, even if we manage to escape a Gulf War.
But those that are still around will increasingly control their own expenditure and keep a tight rein on their finances, because they have to.
One way of doing this is to cut back on staff or unnecessary costs. But the other crucial element is controlling the revenue coming in to a company.
Commission payments on some products, particularly airline seat sales, have been getting smaller by the month. As Farebase managing director Jon Constantine says in the TravelMole interview, agents must increasingly start to add on their own service fees to net fares.
We are slowly but surely moving to a situation where customers will accept paying a fee when they receive good service and when someone saves them time and money by rooting out the best fares.
At the other end of the scale we have the strange situation where agents are being paid sizeable commissions – sometimes over 20 percent – for selling the products of specialist operators.
Good luck to them. But to justify those fees and ensure that they get them in the future, agents must support the operators they work with. Many operators are complaining that agents want to be independent but also want extra payments for signing up a preferred supplier. You just can’t have it both ways.
So, a difficult year in prospect, but also an interesting one. And, as usual, expect the smart agents to come out on top.
Read previous comments by Jeremy Skidmore:
10-Dec-2002 Comment: The Role of Independent Agents
03-Dec-2002 Comment: Anyone got any good news?
26-Nov-2002 Comment: Agent consortia should join, says Jeremy Skidmore
20-Nov-2002 Comment: Winter Bookings, by Jeremy Skidmore
13-Nov-2002 Comment: Timeshare and Resort Conference
05-Nov-2002 Comment: MyTravel
23-Oct-2002 Comment: The ABTA Convention
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