04/05/2020
Travel agents: Heroes or Villains? Our New Zealand travel industry has been turned upside down, and with good reason. Our government needed to close our borders to keep our nation and people safe from the COVID-19 pandemic.
But with that came chaos for travel agents.
We had clients travelling overseas, some in very remote corners of the world, who needed to come home to NZ before the borders closed. We got them home. We worked endless hours, lost sleep and shed copious tears to get our clients back to their families. Job done and those clients are very, very grateful people.
Now we want to help clients who were booked to travel overseas after the borders closed. They’re stuck here, tickets in hand and can’t go anywhere. We want to help them and get the best possible outcome for each and every one. But it’s a long-winded and convoluted process dealing with overseas airlines, land and tour operators, hotels, insurance companies etc who are in the same boat as us; they’ve never had to deal with this situation before. Terms and conditions of carriage are scrutinised, evaluated and interpreted over and over and over again and each time a supplier comes up with a new scenario, we, the travel agent, have to apply it to our clients’ bookings. And every client is unique, every booking, every itinerary is unique. It’s a mine field and it will take months to sort out, client by client, booking by booking. We’re up for it but we need support and understanding from our clients, our communities and our government. And let us be very clear. It is not NZ-based travel agents who are holding refund money, it’s the overseas suppliers. We need to get those refunds back into NZ so we can pass them on to our clients.
We need business support from our government to ensure that we can keep our travel stores open and our amazing, professional travel consultants employed so they can process the fallout of the government’s decision to close the borders. Don’t get us wrong, we agree that the borders needed closing, no argument. But there is an almighty mess to clean up on behalf of Kiwis who had overseas travel booked before the curtain came down.
There are approximately 350 travel agents and 450 travel brokers in New Zealand (pre COVID – that number has likely changed). Based on the assumption that each has an average of $1m - $2m of forward bookings to process refunds for, that means that as an industry we are responsible for getting somewhere in the range of $800m to $1.6b back into the NZ economy. If we don’t do it, who will?
The 12 week Work and Income subsidy came quickly and has allowed us to keep going - so far. But we need to be around for the next 6 months and beyond, or whenever the borders reopen, so we can keep doing our job of repatriating money back to New Zealand.
We need government support because there seems to be an expectation in some quarters that travel agents will do this work for nothing.
When we make bookings on behalf of our clients we get paid commission by our suppliers, usually in the region of 10%, for our professional services to consult, plan, quote, requote, requote, book, amend, rebook, ticket and document every facet of every clients booking. The process can take weeks or months depending on the complexity of the itinerary. So when suppliers are unable to provide their services and authorise a 100% refund, that means we say goodbye to the commission we earned in making the booking. All that time, all that experience and advice to create the trip of a lifetime, for nothing. As well, there are some out there who think that as well as losing our commission on the booking, we should work for nothing to deal with unravelling the bookings with the suppliers and negotiating and processing the refunds back to New Zealand. For any business this model is simply not sustainable or realistic.
Unlike our suppliers who were put in the position of not being able to provide their services, travel agents did and continue to provide professional services.
So we urgently need business support from the government which aligns with our operating costs, our zero income and the time frame in which we are expected to operate while aircraft are on the ground and the borders closed. And we need that support now. The benefit for New Zealand is that the more refund money we are able to process and repatriate to New Zealand clients, the more our clients will be able to spend in supporting their local communities.
Travel agents – heroes or villains? Every single one that I know is a hero and rock star.
