TMCs Staff Up

Staff shortages have dogged the travel industry ever since last summer’s faster-than-expected return to skies. Critical understaffing at travel management companies, in particular, resulted in unanswered traveler inquiries and corporate travel managers buckling under internal pressure as service levels suffered. While some gaps have been plugged, challenges persist.

One global travel manager told BTN last month that their TMC is “still underperforming” in a number of markets due to the absence of experienced staff. They said newcomers often struggle to keep up with volumes, which is having a “knock-on effect globally.” This is not an isolated example. 

Critical Course Corrections 

BTN’s 2023 TMC Reboot survey showed buyers were concerned about service quality, online support and account management due to lack of skilled consultants and account managers.

Many suggested better training for agents, while one buyer said “improved customer service, politeness and professionalism” is needed. Greater technology integration and improved data management were also highlighted as areas of concern, but, essentially, what buyers want from TMCs is better service. 

The aforementioned global travel manager said overall service from their company’s TMC partner is “improving but still challenging” and described the current situation as “frustrating.”  They said, “Delays have led to pricing increases, lack of availability and lack of confidence with the travel management companies. It is very easy to lose confidence in such a highly emotive area [like business travel], where people’s preferences mean a lot.” 

LivaNova global travel and events manager Elisabetta Gibertoni has seen the same. Despite having a high online booking adoption among the medical device company’s traveling employees, the shortage of TMC personnel “has made itself felt” for travelers in the current complex environment. So much so, she’s ready to hold her TMC to account. 

Gibertoni would like to see in her next TMC agreement “more detail on the achievement of service-level agreements with penalties for non-achievement, supported by clear and reliable reporting.” She also wants “greater attention” paid to traveler inquiries.

Getting & Keeping Agency Personnel

Achieving those staffing and proficiency levels may take TMCs more time. In a January poll conducted by the Global Business Travel Association, 46 percent of travel supplier and TMC respondents said their company’s staff size is smaller now than it was before the pandemic.

But nearly two-thirds of suppliers and TMC respondents to the GBTA survey expected staffing will increase “a lot” or “somewhat” in 2023 compared to 2022. Slightly more than a quarter of these respondents, however, expected no change—and it’s not for lack of trying. 

“The talent pool is very thin out there,” said BCD Travel CEO John Snyder at The Beat Live in December. According to a recent report in The Beat, the TMC added 4,500 employees in 2022 and in December the company still had more than 1,000 openings, largely on the frontline. 

The likes of American Express Global Business Travel, BCD and CWT, Snyder said, were all “fighting for the same people,” which also could mean smaller agencies are getting shut out of the competition. 

The talent war is so stiff—and slow-moving—that even big players like BCD have to get more creative, said Snyder. “We’re going to try to stop that game and quit trying to fight for the same people, and we’re going to bring new talented people into the system.” 

Spain-based TravelPerk has gotten creative with its recruitment, according to chief people officer Sally Sourbron. “The company culture and our commitment to its values have been a strong pull,” she said. “We’ve also partnered with organizations such as Code First Girls [in the U.K.] and allWomen [Spain] to attract a diverse talent pool.”

The tech-first agency that focuses on small- and midsize accounts reported a 71 percent increase in employee headcount in 2022, a trend that Sourbron said has continued over the last six months. But just getting the people in the door doesn’t mean they can handle traveler needs right away. Indeed, among TMCs that responded to BTN’s TMC Reboot survey, finding qualified candidates was a major hurdle to hiring staff. But the prospect of training new hires with little travel experience also seemed daunting—and expensive. 

TravelPerk is biting the bullet. The TMC flies newcomers to its HQ in Barcelona for “an intensive onboarding session,” said Sourbron. “We [also] set them up with a ‘buddy’ to help them through anything that is not covered during the onboarding sessions.”

As training and development continue, however, TMCs are confronted with the challenge of strategically deploying experienced resources to ensure the most complex issues can be addressed efficiently. That’s a high bar to clear in an environment where post-pandemic complexity and greater manual intervention is ruling the day, according to ATG Travel CEO Tammy Krings. 

“Clients are expecting [us] to be their trusted advisor more than ever before,” Krings said. 

“Like other TMCs, we are experiencing a higher level of phone calls per transaction by an average of three times higher than pre-pandemic, and call duration is four times longer. In addition, travelers are calling agents to confirm online booking options are correct. All these elements have a significant impact on our staffing requirements,” she said. 

As post-Covid travel ramped up last year, EY global head of travel, meetings and events Karen Hutchings saw similar patterns even among her company’s experienced travelers. “We recognized that calls to the agency were taking longer and people were more nervous about travel,” she said. But rather than relying on the TMC to bulk up staffing, which was clearly challenging, EY took a more novel approach. 

“We built our own service team to deal with traveler queries,” said Hutchings. “It was easier for us to hire people than it was for our TMC—and it’s still easier for us to hire people.”

The nine-person team handles non-booking-related inquiries from 15 countries in Europe and Asia, with plans to extend into the U.S. “Whenever someone calls travel services it’s our team that answers. The call gets triaged by us and punched back to the agency if they want to make a reservation,” said Hutchings. 

Putting People First

Since few companies have the travel volume to justify a similar internal structure to EY, they will continue to look to TMCs to provide those critical services. So what are TMCs doing to make agency positions more attractive to potential candidates?  

“Working on corporate sales at airlines, I met with agents every week,” said Neil Woodliffe, who started his career on the supplier side, but is now the global travel manager for business analytics company Clarivate. “Our top teams networked with agents, and [the airlines] would take them on fam trips. I know budgets are tight now, but what this did was actually create a knowledgeable culture and the agents loved their jobs. Agents were never paid that well, but it was the perks that made the job worthwhile—and they loved it. They were passionate and delivered exceptional quality of service to the client.” 

Today, Woodliffe said, agents, account managers and other TMC roles need better motivations and rewards to recapture that passion, and that comes from more than meeting strict service-level agreements. 

To that end, TMCs—like many employers in current labor market—are remodeling job and pay structures, benefit packages, the physical work environment and how flexible their agencies can be when it comes to home-based and hybrid work. 

Flight Centre Travel Group president for the Americas Charlene Leiss said the company had re-examined its wage model and formulated new incentive structures based on customer success metrics. “We believe what gets incentivized gets done,” she said. Leiss added that the company has increased employee benefits by about 30 percent over the past three years in an effort to make travel agency positions that much more competitive in the marketplace. 

FCTG also will open new “communal” office space in New York City in April, as the TMC approaches pre-pandemic staffing levels. Not everyone will work onsite, and the company is providing more balance with flexible work models. 

Krings said ATG has always worked to support balance for frontline agents, but now the company is doing more. “After the pandemic, ATG adopted a hybrid work environment in which staff members can work with their immediate leadership to decide their level of ‘in office’ and ‘at home’ work, balancing … company needs and the needs of our employees,” she said.

That new flexibility and a “history of offering higher-than-market wages” has helped to retain talent, she said. And while salary increases “have had an impact,” according to Krings, they are the price of doing business in travel today. 

Man Versus Machine

As well as investing in people, TMCs reported to BTN an uptick in technology investment as well—not only in corporate-facing tools but also internally. 

FCTG, for one, has brought more technical expertise in-house. “The technology component—the engineers, developers, programmers—is probably one of the fastest growing parts of our business,” Leiss said. And while FCTG has made some key acquisitions in the past three years to enhance its tech stack—it acquired WhereTo, Shep and more recently took an equity stake in TPConnects—much of the internal tech expertise is paying attention to agent tools. 

“We’re spending a lot of time bolstering some of the technology tools we put in front of our consultants,” FCTG chief experience officer John Morhous told BTN in an interview in December. “It’s not a secret that when Covid happened, we had a mass exodus from the industry. … With agencies, we saw some of the more senior consultants either retire or leave the industry, and you’re left with a vacuum of skilled labor. … [This has] also highlighted [the need to enhance] the tools we put in front of the consultants to make their jobs easier and make them able to see more data at the time the inquiry comes in and understand a lot more about what’s going on with [the traveler]. … So we’re investing a lot in those pieces to improve our servicing capability [and] provide more automation in some situations.” 

ATG’s Krings is thinking similarly. “As we’ve built the technology these past 24-plus months, we’ve taken a more creative look at how it might apply to the agent, account management and other client-facing roles, to align the automated ATG world with the personal, high-touch services,” Krings said. The company has “invested considerably” in artificial intelligence to streamline processes, and the company’s predictive travel planning tool, Baldwin, now includes an agent application.

As the digitization of travel gathers pace, the long-term impact on TMC staffing models is still up for debate. For Erol Arkan, technology and data solutions leader at Amazon Travel, greater digitization doesn’t necessarily mean fewer people.

“It’s about what is the most effective use of [TMCs’] experience and knowledge, and the information they have at their fingertips,” he said, in a session at the Business Travel Show Europe kick-off event in February. He added that rather than focusing on agents to book travel from point A to point B, TMCs need to focus on building strategic relationships with travel managers.

He said there is an expectation that digital solutions are “intuitive enough” for most bookings to be made via self-service tools. TMCs should concentrate on “helping us understand where we can become more mature and [how we can] optimize [our travel programs].” 

But even tech-savvy travel managers admit there are capability gaps, and a reliance on people to enable travel’s day-to-day operations remains.

“We can have self-driving cars, but it’s still hard to find a split-ticket fare,” said Eric Bailey, global director of employee travel and devices at Microsoft. “So, we really do rely on our agency for a few things, including people on the ground and in the field to do a lot of support work,” he said. 

Still, Bailey is optimistic that AI advances—namely ChatGPT, in which Microsoft has invested $10 billion—will result in less reliance on people. “There are still some growing pains… but in five years, we expect significant change,” he said. 

Executive Travel CEO Steve Glenn told BTN he sees promise in ChatGPT as an agent back up system as well as a tool to “train up newbies” and transition new agents into the workforce. 

“We’ve actually been working with our agents already to leverage ChatGPT, especially for what I call ‘back up support’ while the agents are with the customer,” he said. “We sense that it’s a game changer and an added value for the customer. We also see it becoming a kind of knowledge base and something we can use to transition younger workers into the industry.”

Elizabeth West contributed to this report.