On the 'death of the travel agent' framing.
Every February or so a fresh "the travel agent is dead" piece cycles through the trade press, gets quoted in a Skift roundup, gets a counter-piece from ASTA, and disappears until the next cycle. The framing has been wrong for long enough that pointing out it is wrong is itself becoming a cliché. The more useful question, which almost nobody seems to ask, is which travel agencies actually grew through the 2023-2024 window and what the survivors have in common.
The growth is not subtle if you look. Virtuoso reported its member agencies booked record sales in 2023, with the network's consortium-level number above the pre-pandemic high. Internova and Signature Travel Network posted similar shapes. The big host agencies, including Travel Edge, Cadence, and Gifted Travel Network, all grew advisor headcount through 2023, in some cases past their 2019 totals. Booking volume in the leisure-luxury and complex-itinerary segments in particular has been the strongest on record. None of this looks like a category in terminal decline.
What did decline, and what the "death of the travel agent" framing has been confusing itself with for two decades, is the transactional travel agency. The storefront on the corner that booked a flight to Cancun and a Marriott in San Diego for a 5% commission. That business died in two waves. The first wave was the airlines killing commissions in 1995-2002. The second was Expedia, Booking, and Kayak commoditizing the simple itinerary between 2003 and 2015. By the time the trade press started writing the annual obituary in earnest, the thing being mourned was already two decades gone.
The agencies that grew through 2023-2024 are not in that business. They are in a different business that happens to share the same job title. Three things show up in every one of them.
One: they sell judgment, not bookings
The growing agencies are advisor-led, and the advisor's product is a curated itinerary in a category where the client cannot reasonably evaluate the alternatives on their own. African safaris, multi-stop Asia, river cruise route selection, hard-to-book lodges, anything where the client has more money than time and the cost of getting it wrong is a ruined trip. The advisor's value is "I have been there or I know somebody who has, and I know what is worth your time in March specifically." That is not a booking-engine problem. It does not get easier when the booking engine gets smarter.
Two: they monetize on supplier commissions plus advisor fees, not transaction margin
The economics work because the advisor charges a planning fee, anywhere from $250 to several thousand depending on the trip, and stacks it on top of supplier-paid commissions that the OTAs cannot access. Four Seasons, Aman, Belmond, the major cruise lines, the safari operators all pay meaningful commissions to a real human advisor inside a real consortium and pay nothing to Expedia. The model only works for trips where the supplier-paid commission is a real number, which is the same set of trips where the client is paying for judgment anyway. The two filters select for the same category.
Three: they did the technology shift the OTAs were supposed to make impossible
The growing agencies use software that did not exist in 2010. Tern, AXUS, TravelJoy, Tripsuite, the new generation of advisor-side itinerary tools are roughly as good now as the customer-facing OTA tools were five years ago, and the gap is closing. The advisor uses these tools in the same way a senior consultant uses a research stack — to prepare faster, present better, and spend more of the billable hour on judgment instead of paperwork. The technology that was supposed to kill the travel advisor instead became a force multiplier for the advisors who picked the right segment.
The annual obituary keeps getting written because the people writing it are looking at the wrong number. Total agent count is down from its 1995 peak. That is true. It has also been true every year since 1996 and tells you nothing about the segment that matters. The number worth watching is consortium-level booking volume in the leisure-luxury and complex-itinerary categories, advisor productivity inside the host agencies, and whether the new advisor-side software stack keeps closing its gap with the OTA stack. All three are pointing the same direction, and all three have been pointing that direction for long enough that calling 2024 the year the travel advisor disappears requires a specific kind of editorial determination.
The travel advisor did not die. The transactional travel agency died, twenty years ago, and the parts of the industry that were never in that business have spent the intervening two decades figuring out what they are actually good at. What they are good at, it turns out, is the thing search engines and booking platforms have inevitably been the worst at: telling a specific client which of seventeen plausible options is the right one for them this March. That is a category that grows when the alternatives get cheaper and more abundant, not one that shrinks. Watch the consortium numbers next February. The framing will need a new headline.
—TJ