Agent Incentives Increase

<B> Agent Incentives Increase</B>

By Sarah Welt

Travel management companies, combatting the longstanding lack of quality corporate travel agents, are employing extremely aggressive recruitment efforts, paying top dollar and including better benefits and incentive programs than ever before.

One reason it still is difficult to find qualified applicants, insiders said, is that those agencies inclined to pay their staff competitive salaries, benefits and signing bonuses are retaining those employees, meaning fewer agents are jumping ship.

"We have always been pretty aggressive with payment and benefits packages in trying to attract and retain very experienced agents," said Tower Travel Management vice president John Smith. "Our current group of almost 40 agents average over nine years. While they don't come banging down our doors, when we do have job openings we have a good enough reputation to not have as much difficulty as other agencies seem to have in finding good applicants."

Still, he noted, there is an incredible amount of competition. "When we win a new piece of business, we need to get agents on board fast--and that means lots of signing bonuses and high salary and benefits packages to attract the limited amount of people out there."

The need to staff up quickly also can mean having to pay agents incentives to relocate. According to Jason King, New York-based Yours in Travel Personnel president, "Relocation is high right now. Companies are willing to do it if they can't find candidates in a specific location."

He said that 25 to 30 percent of his business involved relocation this year, up from 5 to 6 percent a year ago. "Last year and this year I haven't seen less than $1,000 to sign on and some have even had a $5,000 sign-on bonus to relocate."

King disputed claims that there is a dearth of qualified agents, arguing that plenty of good applicants are to be had. "There are more agents available than ever before, at least in my 27-and-a-half years, and everyone is calling me and saying it's dry. Our database is overflowing with top international and domestic agents. My Web site is bringing on 20,000 new candidates a month."

He said that the reason some travel agencies are having trouble finding agents is that, "They don't want to pay, and in today's economy, the good agents are looking for top pay and top benefits."

Top pay and benefits can be as high as $45,000 in New York, compared with $38,000 to $42,000 a year ago, King said. In Chicago, corporate agents with nine years of experience make between $35,000 and $40,000, up about 10 percent from last year, Smith noted.

At New York-based Advanced Travel Management, meanwhile, average salaries for corporate agents with two to three years experience range from $40,000 to $43,000 depending on the level of ability, said director of human resources Christine Hayles. Senior agents, those with four to seven years under their belts, can command between $42,000 and $45,000, and "those salaries were being paid a year ago."

Advanced Travel has not had difficulty finding qualified agents. Hayles said 60 percent of those it hires come from employee referrals and roughly 40 percent come from a local headhunter. Newspaper classified advertising has not proven fruitful.

"I just had one ad in the paper asking for senior Sabre agents and got a lot of people saying they were senior agents, but when we got a Sabre expert to administer a test, we found they were junior agents," Hayles said. With the employee referral program, 99 percent of the time "that individual is a senior agent and capable of doing the work."

Smith said as a general rule, Tower Travel has ceased to run classified ads because of a low response rate, and like Advanced Travel, relies heavily on employee referrals. "We offer substantial referral bonuses for existing employees. They earn $1,000 for the first referral and it goes up from there."

San Diego-based Balboa Travel's chairman and CEO Joe da Rosa said that the difficulty in finding qualified agents depends on the market. He said that the Bay Area is a particularly hard market in which to find agents, in part because the cost of living is high and salaries have to rise accordingly.

"Despite all the talk about direct booking tools," da Rosa said, "the majority of reservations are still handled by agents, and corporate customers require they be well served."

He added that a booming economy is causing companies to expand their sales and operations, leading to more business and more people traveling, which creates the need for more agents. Another factor is that the high demand means that people are willing to quit their jobs and go where they can find more money.

Despite all these factors, Balboa has been able to find applicants. "They aren't lined up at the door, but you can still find qualified people in a tight market. Most of us are interested in more than a warm body."

Still, some members of the travel education community believe that it's a dry market.

"There is no question about it that if I asked 25 owners or managers to name their greatest challenge, a significant percentage would say it's finding and retaining good people," said Bob Lepisto, president of the Institute of Certified Travel Agents of Wellsley, Mass. It's hard in a full employment economy, he said, but, "We as an industry do a good job with on-campus recruiting at the high school or college level."

Cambridge, Mass.-based Travel Education Center placement coordinator Nancy Quinn said, "We are finding a high demand for our grads from the big companies, but we definitely have more jobs than graduates." She added that record low unemployment is part of the reason that enrollment has been low, as well as the negative publicity about commission cuts.

The commission cuts also have caused TEC to redefine its educational requirements somewhat. Because agencies have had to diversify their businesses, training has focused less on airline sales and more on cruises and tours. And the increased use of automation by many companies has prompted TEC to include Internet training in the 2000 curriculum.

While Lepisto knows of several travel schools that had to close their doors over the past year, he also said, "The Institute of Certified Travel Agents is going to enroll more people in the certification program this year than in the past 10 years. There is an increased interest in professional certification as travel agents are becoming less and less processors of data and reservations agents, and more professional travel counselors."

One factor driving the trend to get certified is the increased use of the Internet. More and morse reservations are driven online and "if you are not going to be talking to customers directly, then having that third-party validation that you are dealing with a professional is more important than in the past," Lepisto said.

Quinn said increased use of the Internet actually has made it "harder to bridge the brand-new student into a really responsible job as a corporate agent. There aren't any more delivery people, there aren't any office assistants. They are into more intensified positions right away than they were three years ago."

Another reason for the increased interest by agents in Certified Travel Associate or Certified Travel Counselor accreditation is that in today's market, certified agents earn more. An ICTA study of 530 respondents, including 301 CTCs (both corporate and leisure), found that in 1998, the average CTC made $32,500, while non-CTCs earned an average of $22,600.

Quinn said American Express recruits out of TEC and pays agents $19,500 to start, up $2,000 from a year ago because of increased demand.

While those numbers may seem low, Quinn said, "the benefits are much better than they were three years ago. The benefits and salary are finally getting to the point where you can quote them without embarrassment.