Storefront Travel Agencies Get Reimagined as Social Hubs
Skift Take
Travel agencies are thriving by replacing offices with lounges, complete with drinks and parties. By setting up shopfronts on busy streets, they’re also convincing travelers that they still exist.
Tafari Travel in Brooklyn, New York, opens to the historic Dumbo neighborhood with four-windowed garage doors, drawing passersby to a mid-20th-century-style lounge with modern touches stocked with coffee, wine, and vintage Holiday magazines.
Most catch sight of the resort photos posted in the windows, and think the converted warehouse is a real estate office.
“A lot of people come in and ask us what we are. They’ve never used a travel agent before,” said co-founder Leah Smith, who designed the year-old agency with “a nostalgia for the glamour of travel in the '60s.”
Front and Center
Patterned after Austin’s Departure Lounge, the travel-agency-and-bar mix created by Keith Waldon in 2013, Tafari, which includes a sister agency in Denver, serves up complimentary drinks in a glossy lounge that often shifts into an event space.
Departure Lounge and the Tafari agencies sit “front and center on the street,” as Waldon says, where locals are likely to stumble upon them.
Most people think travel agents don’t exist any
