For Many Women, Being a Travel Agent Is Just the Ticket to Job Satisfaction

Three-quarters of all travel agents are women, according to Plog Research Inc., a company that studies trends in travel.

When I asked several travel professionals why, I got a discouraging answer: “Being a travel agent is not noted as a high-salary position,” said Nadine Godwin, editor in chief of Travel Weekly. The publication, which serves the travel industry, conducts a nationwide, biennial survey of agents that includes information on agent salaries. Its last survey, published in the summer of 1998, found that agents who work on commission (considered more lucrative than salaried jobs) and have been in the business five to 10 years make about $25,614 a year.

By contrast, Annette Pressman, co-owner of Willett Travel in Studio City, employs a female agent who makes $3.5 million a year, booking trips for film and TV crews from her home. Kathryn W. Sudeikis, a vice president at All About Travel in the suburbs of Kansas City, Mo., and the national secretary for the American Society of Travel Agents, or ASTA, knows another home-based, part-time female agent who recently made $50,000 booking 270 friends and family members on a cruise. (The kicker is she got to go along.)

Being a travel agent once meant sitting in a chair, taking orders and collecting a paycheck, which accounts partly for the low salaries. But with airlines cutting back on commissions to travel agents and more consumers arranging their own trips through the Internet, agents can no longer afford to sit back.

Still, there is money to be made for smart, dedicated people who enter the business with no illusions.

Being a travel agent has long been a woman’s domain, partly because it has attracted stay-at-home wives seeking to augment their husbands’ salaries and empty-nest mothers with time on their hands, the agents say. It’s a fairly easy profession to enter, Sudeikis said; travel schools abound, and advanced instruction is available from the nonprofit Institute of Certified Travel Agents, based in Wellesley, Mass. (Eighty-two percent of the organization’s certified travel counselors are women, said Bill Connors, ICTA vice president.) Moreover, it doesn’t take a major cash investment to become a travel agent, Travel Weekly editor Godwin noted; overhead is low, and you don’t have to buy inventory, as you would if you wanted to open a retail shop.

Women have also been attracted to the profession because travel is considered a “fun item to sell,” said Joanie Ogg, president of the National Assn. of Commissioned Travel Agents, based in Alexandria, Va. Women thought it was glamorous and hoped to enjoy perks aplenty, like free airline tickets and industry-sponsored visits to exciting places, known as “familiarization,” or “fam,” tours. Susan Dushane, an agent at Travel by Greta in Northridge and president of the Southern California chapter of ASTA, remembers the good old days when she went on a research trip to Israel and Jordan for $99. But now only well-established travel agents are offered fam tours, and the airlines have become tightfisted with free or reduced-price tickets to travel agents.

Even if the perks are drying up, Dushane thinks that being a travel agent is a good career for home-bound women. We’ve come a long way from the days of June Cleaver, but there are still lots of stay-at-home moms who would like to pursue a career while watching their children play in the backyard; others simply prefer to work at home.

Women who work in a travel agency office often find a great deal of freedom in being an agent. ASTA national secretary Sudeikis said that once you prove yourself, “you can call the shots.” At her agency, job-sharing, flex time and home-based agenting are possible.

Many people I talked to think that home-based agenting is the wave of the future. Independent travel agents can hook up from their home offices to “host agencies,” like Four 40 Travel in Denver, which employs 145 agents across the country, 95% of whom are women. Most of them have fax machines and computers with Internet access. Once they make a sale, Four 40 usually does the nitty-gritty of ticketing, splitting commissions with the home-based agents who found the customers.

Most agents are discovering that booking big-ticket tours and cruises, not airline tickets, is the way to make money. Others, like Marsha Calig, owner of Calig World Travel in Woodland Hills, have carved out specialties by thinking creatively; after her husband died, she started People Without Partners, a group for widowed, divorced and single people over 45.

The key to success is becoming just this sort of Pied Piper for your host travel agency by establishing a client list based on ready-made markets, such as church, community or singles groups. Kulin Strimbu, president of Four 40 Travel, has seen women do well by selling travel to clients of their attorney and real-estate-agent husbands.

The most accomplished travel agents are still true professionals who devote time and energy to their work, staying abreast of developments in the industry, making contacts and researching destinations for sometimes highly demanding customers. But the essential skills of a travel agent are those of a good counselor, like listening and encouraging questions.

“These are skills women are good at,” said Connors of ICTA, who notes that the counseling field is also dominated by women.

“There are fewer and fewer really good people in the business,” Connors added. So while travel agenting may not be a gold mine and doesn’t mean sitting in a chair and taking orders, it sounds as though what the industry needs is a few good women.