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Agents Fight Back
The Travel Critic · August 17, 1998

Last week's tirade about travel agents drew a swift and remarkably angry response from readers. I was called everything from "Mr. Oatmeal For Brains," to "idiot" to four-letter words we can't publish, for suggesting retailers are running a scam. Some letters even demanded my immediate banishment from ABCNews.com.

At issue were agents' split allegiances. They get a ticketing fee from you, but they also take commissions and other bonuses from airlines, hotels and car rental companies. Whose side are the middlemen on? The ones paying the most money, I contended-in other words, the suppliers.

Some travelers agreed that I had identified a conflict of interest, describing their own painful experiences of buying overpriced trips. "My old travel agent would only book flights and hotels that would benefit his interests," one reader complained.

But the majority of e-mails came from irate agents.

"Would you kindly disclose how much you made on this scandalous article?" asked Leo van Esschoten, a co-owner of the Ontario Travel Bureau in Ontario, Calif. "Better yet, how much were you paid by one or more airlines to bash travel agents?"

Little did van Esschoten know that I live a few miles away. I called him up and offered to answer his questions in person. "My only condition is that we leave the firearms at home," I added. He agreed.

I met van Esschoten and his wife, Laurie, for lunch and spent a couple hours at their agency. Their biggest gripe is that I had baked every travel agent in the same pie. By hinting that the woefully flawed ticket distribution system was corrupting all retailers, I'd done a disservice to the travel agency business.

I generally target my columns to frequent travelers, who tend to use corporate travel agencies. And yes, bigger agencies work under different commission structures and arguably have more of an incentive to sell you a bum ticket, although even larger agencies contend there's not as much as I indicated.

Singling out the mom-and-pop agencies wasn't part of my plan. Times are hard for businesses like the van Esschoten's. The average commission they get from each airline ticket has slipped from about $28 in the second quarter of 1997 to $20 this month.

The agency also charges a $15 transaction fee to its clients. The total cost of making a booking is $25-a figure that includes overhead, salaries and taxes-meaning the van Esschotens are realizing a razor-thin $10 profit on each ticket after commissions and fees. Bottom line, they need both.

So whose side is the Ontario Travel Bureau on? Laurie van Esschoten offered a complex answer.

"We're on the client's side, of course," she says. "But we also do a constant balancing act between customer desires and the needs of the business."

Virgin Atlantic, for example, is running an incentive program for agents at the moment. Sell six Virgin tickets and get a free round-trip ticket to London. The Ontario Travel Bureau had already booked five Virgin tickets when it found out about the special, but getting that sixth one proved to be ethically troublesome. Laurie says she ended up telling a London-bound client about the deal. He bought the ticket. (They held an employee raffle for the freebie.)

After spending the afternoon at the Ontario Travel Bureau, I returned to the office to find a polite but forceful letter from Mike Spinelli, president and chief executive of the American Society of Travel Agents. "I was appalled after reading your seething attack on travel agents," he wrote.

ASTA took exception to my assertion that agencies were getting a 15 percent commission, after so-called "overrides." His sentiments were echoed in numerous other agent messages that reminded me "on round-trip domestic airline tickets, we're getting an 8 percent commission, capped at $50."

I was referring to agreements between some of the larger agencies and various airlines that offer additional commission above the eight percent if they sell a certain number of tickets on those carriers. Spinelli described the statement as "a figment of someone's fertile imagination."

The corporate agencies in question are tight-lipped about the overrides airlines send them. But sources close to the business have assured me that I'm correct, at least when it comes to the mega-agencies.

Finally, Spinelli tore into me for claiming that agents are constantly wooed by suppliers-particularly the airlines-with irresistible incentives and cocktail parties.

I've been to lots of these receptions and have partaken of the shrimp cocktail and the open bar. Perhaps the mom-and-pop operations aren't getting as many airline sales rep visits as they once were, but trust me, the big agencies are still being courted.

What's so wrong with that? In fact, what's so wrong with someone taking a commission and charging you a modest ticketing fee? That's business, agents point out. And they're not running a charity, after all.

But to me, getting paid by both the airline and the consumer creates a conflict of interest on the part of the agent. Until that changes, I think agents will continue to struggle-and some of us will continue to wonder if we're really getting the best deal when we book our travel through an agency.

Christopher Elliott is a travel commentator and author of A Bridge to Nowhere: A Year in the Florida Keys. All e-mailed questions may be edited, condensed or republished at the site's discretion.