TTG at 70: how travel agents have stood the test of time

The 1980s and 1990s were the heyday of retail travel, with consortia and multiples dominating the high street. Vertical integration – owning all or most of the elements that make up a business – was the model used by the biggest names in travel, some still around today.

Big tour operators built their own high street travel agencies to guide consumers towards their products and avoid paying commission to independent retailers. They then flew customers on their own airlines and, in several cases, to their own hotels.

The directional sales tactics used by in-house agencies were sometimes questionable; often, no alternatives were offered to the brands they pushed. Customers were encouraged to buy with dubious “discounts” of 20% or even 30%, tied to the purchase of the brand’s own travel insurance sold at a hugely inflated price – a practice competition authorities eventually outlawed.

The most famous high street brand was Thomas Cook, once best known for its overseas railway timetable. Cook went mainstream, targeting the bucket and spade market, but Thomson – now Tui UK – owned the Lunn Poly brand, which grew to 800 shops, becoming Britain’s biggest agency chain.

The Lunn Poly name stemmed from Sir Henry Lunn – a travel organiser in today’s language – and the Polytechnic Touring Association, a 19th-century society for sport and educational tours. In 2004, the Lunn Poly name was dropped in favour of Thomson, with a further rebrand to Tui in 2017.

The other big brand in the 1990s was Going Places, owned by Airtours, which vied for Thomson’s top spot and briefly secured it. Airtours bought the Hogg Robinson and Pickfords agency chains and combined them, growing Going Places to 750 branches, but by the time Airtours was sold to Thomas Cook in 2010, all but 70 shops had disappeared.

High street travel agencies are now diminished in number – Tui has 322 compared with 600-plus only six years ago, but is still opening in a few locations. Nevertheless, Hays Travel’s 457 and Advantage Travel Partnership’s 750 members are signs of a stabilising sector. And following the pandemic, it feels like consumers really are starting to recognise their value.

Hays, having absorbed Thomas Cook and Bath Travel’s branches, is still expanding; in September, it bought all but one of Just Go Travel’s 46 shops in Wales and the North West, which had, since 2015, been run under the Hays banner as a franchise partner.

Hays was among the brands to pick up on the trend towards homeworking. Pre-pandemic, homeworking was already an expanding sector, with many of the agents made redundant by the big chains setting up prospering businesses on their own terms.

Post-Covid, this trend has continued, with many joining ventures like Travel Counsellors that have become familiar names to consumers without any high street presence.

Both business types are flourishing, and a headline from TTG in 1953 sums up how the agent’s role is as relevant now as always. Almost 70 years to the day before the 2023 August bank holiday air traffic control meltdown, it said simply: “Agents do good job aiding stranded travellers”, detailing how they had helped clients during a general strike in France.

Seventy years on, agents are still helping stranded travellers, while also assembling complex itineraries, arranging weddings and generally making dreams come true.

That’s why, despite everything the industry has been through, there very much remains a role for good travel agents.