How travel agents and tour operators can switch lives

OPERATOR TO AGENT

Former semi-professional golfer Anna Perrott started her travel career around 15 years ago at OTA Cruise.co.uk. Acquisitions led to her gaining both consumer- and trade-facing experience. She went on to head up cruise for Travelbag, then joined Windstar, where her UK-based role straddled sales, marketing and PR. She’s now back at an agency as head of supplier relations at Panache Cruises. With a young baby, reducing time on the road was a motivating factor.

“It’s great that you get to see all sides of business, it helps with negotiating rates,” Anna says of her varied career. She can look at a cruise line’s inventory and average price per day and understand their margin. “Commercially that puts you in a stronger position,” she explains. “We know how much leeway they have when discounting their fares and getting the best deal for clients.”

On the other side of the fence, at Windstar her OTA background helped her create incentives for agents and give them tools for an “easy sell”. She believes more suppliers should hire agents to gain “honest input” on what works. “You can pick up a lot of bad habits from moving from cruise line to cruise line, what we need is for people to shake it up,” she says.  

For those considering a switch within travel, she advises: “As long as you’ve got relationship-building skills, you can do that B2B or do that B2C,” though she notes, “moving from sales into a more commercial role there’s definitely a pay increase that’s quite substantial”. 

AGENT TO OPERATOR

Andy Tait worked for Real Holidays, then Travelwise, an Aito independent agent which tour-operated to some destinations. He then crossed to work as a trade-facing business development manager for Inside Travel Group and has recently started as senior BDM at cruise line AE Expeditions.

He explains of his original switch: “I’m quite ambitious so I wanted to see progression in my career. [As an agent] I knew what I was doing at that point and there wasn’t much scope.”

He became interested in a BDM role but wasn’t willing to “jump for the sake of jumping”. As a big seller for Inside Japan, Andy learnt that its parent company was recruiting its first BDM and was excited about the fit.

As “the bridge between agent and operator,” Andy built profiles of agencies to share with the Inside team, noting their client types and even level of chattiness.

Meanwhile, his background helped create trust with trade partners. “I think the agents really respected that I’d been an agent. So, when there was a problem (thankfully not that often), they’d say, ‘you were an agent, so you know what I’m going to ask’. They knew I knew what they were going through.”

Andy says suppliers should appreciate that agents “know their client inside out”. And he believes they often don’t realise how intertwined agents are with every department. “The same person making a booking will be paying the bill, asking for social media collateral, events support or training,” he explains.

Agents wanting to join an operator could also consider sales, he says, especially if they have a compatible specialism, and points out this can include part-time opportunities.

Marketing too is possible because agents “see clients upfront” and some have developed great social media connections. “Operators have the [marketing] budget… you have a granular knowledge,” he points out, adding, “I would strongly encourage operators to look for agents wanting to flip to the other side.”