Luxury advisor calls for industry action on 'non-professional' agents
Emma DooneyAmanda Teale, founder of luxury lifestyle brand Minerva Private Travel & Lifestyle Management, has urged advisors to join her call for higher standards across the industry.
A top luxury advisor has called for major changes across the sector, warning that the profession has been “diluted” by the rise of untrained agents.
Entrepreneur Amanda Teale believes it’s time to introduce mandatory regulation and normalise charging fees, having noticed what she says is a drop in industry standards since launching her independent firm, Minerva Private Travel & Lifestyle Management, in 1999.
The Surrey-based company organises bespoke journeys for ultra-wealthy travellers, some of whom have been clients for more than 25 years. Discretion is at the heart of the business, with its evasion of PR and advertising only adding to its exclusivity.
Today, Teale has just 12 employees; eleven in the UK and one in the US. She refuses to share her telephone number publicly, opting instead to accept clients only via referrals. She keeps her customer network small, and says she only works with people she likes.
She is unapologetically one of the industry’s most selective and secretive advisors, a strategy that has also made her one of its most in-demand.
Teale’s bookings typically range from £50,000 to £100,000, with her highest to date being a £750,000 private island holiday in the Maldives. She is known to make the impossible possible, having done everything from cordoning off the Belvedere Terrace in Villa Cimbrone, one of the Amalfi Coast’s most prestigious properties, for a proposal, to securing £250,000 of box tickets for the highly-anticipated Oasis reunion tour. She proudly tells me she never takes a day off, and that she will go as far as the moon (if the budget allows) to fulfil her clients’ desires.
But despite the success of her own career, Teale is concerned about the industry’s future. The travel veteran fears that the sector’s respectability has suffered in recent years due to a rise in untrained agents, whom she believes often lack the skills needed to do the job properly.
“The biggest problem we have right now is that we’ve opened the floodgates to non-professionals,” Teale tells TTG Luxury. “It’s diluting the industry.”
Having chosen to fly below the radar for decades, Teale is now determined to speak out about this issue. She insists the sector needs to separate the amateurs from the professionals, and as with any industry, that starts with the introduction of mandatory qualifications.
The Travel Bar
The current landscape of the travel industry means that, technically, anyone can choose to identify as a travel agent/advisor as there is no legal requirement to have any formal qualifications or accreditation to start making bookings. However, newcomers would generally be advised to join an agency that belongs to Abta and to sell product from operators and cruise lines that offer flight-inclusive Atol-protected packages.
Teale welcomes the introduction of a mandatory qualification for advisors, which, as is the case in many other professional fields, would be regulated by an external body. “To be a lawyer you have to pass the bar. So many agents don’t even book flights, or know how to operate a GDS,” she says. “They’re hotel bookers - they’re not advisors.”
“The biggest problem we have right now is that we’ve opened the floodgates to non-professionals”
No fee, no trip
It’s not a new call, but Teale advocates that advisors should be charging fees for their services, something she herself has been doing since April 2020.
At a time where the world was prematurely mourning the travel industry, she was strategically investing in its resurrection. Resolute that her business would survive the Covid-19 pandemic, she introduced a 3% non-refundable fee for all bookings and sent a PDF to her clients explaining the policy’s terms and conditions.
“I said to myself: ‘I will never put my company in this position again’. I’d worked too hard to lose everything,” she recalls.
Despite the reluctance agents may have about charging for their services, Teale says she had “zero resistance” from clients after she introduced her fees. In fact, she even increased the charge this year to 3.5% and again, has received no pushback.
“Fees will put an end to the constant price warring and give us more credibility as a profession,” says Teale. “A lawyer will spend several years training to be a lawyer, we spend several years travelling the world to build our knowledge. It’s a service from an expert, and that expertise is gained from hours and hours of hard work.”
“The travel agent name is wrong - we’re professional travel advisors”
What’s in a name?
Teale also argues that the branding of the profession is inaccurate, as it fails to reflect the skills and graft involved in planning travel full-time.
“The travel agent name is wrong - we’re professional travel advisors,” she says. “It gives the impression that all we do is make bookings.” She herself is a testament to the power of a rebrand, having gone from strength to strength since changing her own business’s name in 2017.
“I previously went by ‘Travel by Amanda’, but one of my clients said the name creates the image of a homeworker,” she explains, echoing the concerns raised by others in the industry about the terminology around the profession. Determined to look more “commercial”, she decided to rebrand to Minerva Private Travel after discovering an Amalfi Coast hotel that shared the Roman name - and she hasn’t looked back since.
“It wasn’t until my launch that someone said to me, ‘Minerva is the goddess of wisdom’,” Teale recalls. “I had no idea! It’s terribly arrogant but that’s not what it was about at all!”
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