The Travel Agent of the Future May Be the Travel Agent of the Past

Travel agencies face many systemic threats in terms of continuing to grow their businesses. The empowering of travelers with online booking sites, and the slew of destination information available online through sites like TripAdvisor and Yelp, have led agencies to think more strongly about how to stay relevant to their clients. For the last few years, travel agencies and consortia have been looking at ways to both bring younger workers into the business and ensure that older agents have the marketing ability to remain relevant in an increasingly crowded digital marketplace. "The way I would start is to think about where the travel customers are going, and if that is changing we need to adapt to that," said Tanuj Suri, vice president of global partnerships at American Express Travel. "Customers today are behaving differently and traveling to different places than they were a few years ago. Accessing information is easy, so what is it from an experience perspective that an agent