Like many travel advisors, Susan Berman has been here before. She quit her job and opened her agency right after 9-11—and having lived through those hard times, feels she is prepared for this one.
Back then, with friends and family members saying she was crazy to go into the travel business when no one was traveling, her financial advisor recommended she have a two-year slush fund to carry her through. And while she doesn’t need it yet, it’s sure comforting to know it’s there.
Luxury travel advisor Dolev Azaria, meanwhile, is seeing a new kind of bounce at Azaria Travel in New York. In the home of the most coronavirus cases in the nation, customers whose offices and schools are closed are looking to get out of Manhattan and work somewhere else.
“Personally I’m trying to help contain this pandemic by not being around too many people, by staying home as much as I can and not exposing myself,” Azaria says—and now she is starting to feel she should get out of the city altogether. “I’d rather spend time in Miami or Montana or Turks and Caicos and be a little more isolated.”
Now customers are beginning to share that interest. “We’re definitely seeing an uptick in people recognizing that they won’t have to go into the office for two or three weeks and preferring to work elsewhere,” she says. “They are realizing they will have a lot of time off, and are eager to spend that time in a place that’s less busy and more exciting.”
Many are headed to Florida, the traditional winter refuge of New Yorkers, but others are looking farther afield. And those in the upper echelons increasingly are asking about private jets.
Azaria is careful though, to give clients information but not advice. So despite the urge to push them to rebook immediately, “I think in this moment they don’t want to hear, ‘Let’s book your fall 2022 vacation.’ The world doesn’t stop, but we have to be very considerate of where our clients are, saying ‘We’re here to help you’ and trying to come up with promos for people who do want to book,” she said. “I’m coming from a place of care, giving clients options because we care for them and want them to be able to travel if they so choose. Many are not planning to travel until they have a better understanding of what this looks like and others are just eager to get out.”
In the corporate market, too, Fox World Travel has been on the phones with corporate customers and their travelers, says VP of Business Travel George Kalka. With more than $500 million in annual sales, the agency long ago automated much of the process of applying refunds for cancellations and unused tickets, and automatically applies them when travelers rebook. Still, though, he said, “our culture is that we pick up the phone and call the traveler if there’s a schedule change; it’s who we are.”
He agrees that the crisis will help customers understand the importance of working with a professional travel agency. Like leisure agents, he is supporting his corporate customers with the information they need to make informed decisions as they represent the travel department in cross-functional meetings that often include the HR, security, risk management, medical and legal departments.
Lessons Learned So Far
Even as the situation remains fluid, meanwhile, travel advisors already have learned lessons for running their businesses. While Azaria always recommended travel cancellation insurance, she will be more careful to ensure clients pay attention to how important that is. “Our clients’ loss is our loss,” she says. “This is going to force us to not just strongly recommend insurance, but really ensure they take it.“
As for her business, after “three weeks of cancellations and handholding,” she is reminded once again that “even though the luxury travel business is a great space to be in, when the economy falls, so do we.”
She is spending hours on the phones, contacting not just her clients, but also her suppliers—nudging each “individually for every client on a case by case basis” to see where she can help clients with waivers and cancellations.
If there is a lesson, there, she says, it’s how wonderful those suppliers have been.
“Most have been amazing,” she said. “Our suppliers have gone to great lengths to modify their cancellation policies, and travel agents are there for one another. We have an incredible industry that’s really pulled together in an extraordinarily difficult time. It makes me proud. Even though we’re suffering, we’re going through it together.”
Berman, too, is hanging in there through this crisis, waiting for better times.
“You cannot live in a commission-only business that is so dependent on the economy without a reserve fund,” she says. “Things always ebb and flow; we have good months and bad months, somebody gets sick or you lose a big group. It’s a very volatile industry.”
For now, she is taking care to stay in touch and underscore what she can do for her customers. When one, an attorney with a $35,000 booking in an Owner’s Suite on Oceania, wanted to cancel immediately, for example, she said, “hey, we’re going to play chicken and wait them out,” until eventually the cruise was canceled.
Another lesson is that because suppliers like Gogo, Travel Impressions and Funjet pay just $100 per booking in commission on cancellations, whenever she has two couples traveling together, she books them separately.
She’s advising her 11 independent contractors “to just do a lot of listening, determine what the customer wants and give them exact information – links to the supplier, WHO, CDC – and always, always tell them to call their doctor.”
And take a breath. “You just have to reel yourself in, look at the facts and try not to get emotional. I just keep telling myself it’s only temporary, it’s only temporary, it’s only temporary—and then the binge will come.”
She’s also hoping her suppliers have the same reserve she does. She noted that Royal Caribbean, Silversea, Seabourn and Regent have been great partners in this difficult time. But she has been calling Gogo and Funjet, nudging them to move up their final payment due dates to 30 days out instead of 45 “to give people a little more time to get through this, rather than losing the business altogether.”
As ever, she said, “I’m trying to think of how to make the customer happy and my agents happy, and how to save the booking. So let’s all try to work together.”
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