About five years ago, television production manager Alisha Klein purchased the Dream Vacations franchise. Although she enjoyed her job, she felt it was taxing. Klein, who has been a traveler all her life, was drawn to the industry.
Alisha Klein
Klein was working part-time for a new travel series based in Coral Springs, Florida. Although he was hit hard by the pandemic, his fortunes have started to recover in recent years. Last October, she quit the TV show and turned full-time to running a travel agency.
“I loved every minute of it,” Klein said.
Klein attributes much of her decision to participating in ASTA’s first mentorship program. She applied last year on a whim after seeing an email, but the program and her mentor, Jen Li, president of Vacation Planners, a new franchise of Travel Planners International, gave her full advice. This motivated me to make time a profession.
Klein is not alone. ASTA announced it will launch the program in 2023 and double the number of mentor-mentee pairs this year.
Although the number of shoes scheduled to be sold in 2024 is still small at 21 pairs, demand is high. Alvin Adriano, the association's industry director, said the program has attracted hundreds of mentee applications. The first year, 40 or 50 people applied to be mentors, and this year more than 70 people applied.
The mentorship program is part of an eight-step educational framework for advisors that the association has honed over the past few years.
This revamp and other similar initiatives across the industry come at a time when consumer demand for advisors is at an all-time high and new entrants are rushing into the industry in droves.
The Travel Institute announced that enrollment for its TripKit introductory training course, designed for new advisors, increased 20% in the first quarter of 2024 compared to the same period last year. Additionally, registrations for the industry's first informational webinar increased slightly to 2,948 in the first quarter of this year, compared to 2,913 last year.
“We've received tremendous feedback from all types of stakeholders, from our members to consortia to host agencies, about how we can help them build their businesses,” said Mark Meader, ASTA's senior vice president of industry affairs and education. I've come,'' he said. “It is a deficiency that needs to be considered and corrected.”
New mentorship programs such as ASTA's, like Brownell's Mentoring Program (the Birmingham, Ala.-based host agency is No. 44 on Travel Weekly's Power List), are partnering with long-tenured mentors with a track record of success in the industry. Participate in a long program.
The selective program, which has a 2% pass rate, is currently conducting its 28th and 29th classes.
“Interest in our mentoring program continues to grow, and so does the caliber of our candidates,” said Kelly Dyer, chief development officer at Brownell. Class 29 has three Ivy League graduates, two from Harvard Law School.
Graduates of the program tend to be successful. Dyer pointed to Christy Menzies of Menzies Luxe Retreat in Darien, Connecticut. Menzies, a former Wall Street executive, has exceeded $1 million in annual revenue during his coaching career and was awarded Virtuoso's Rising Star Award in 2023.
Prescription Travel Group's new mentorship program is for interns in the University of Georgia's hospitality program. The program is also supported by Prescription's host agency, Montecito Village Travel.
Gail Smith
Prescription's previous success with travel mentorship inspired this program. Head Travel His advisor Sam Johnson connected with his CEO and founder Gayle Smith through his internship and stayed on to become an advisor despite a job opportunity in the hotel sector. I chose to make it my career.
The group modeled the new program after Johnson's internship under Prescription's new Red and Black Travel division. The project began in January this year, with 12 interns spending six months learning about his career in travel advice.
Internships are paid and give interns the opportunity to earn college credit and sell travel in a supervised atmosphere.
“We need to bring in new blood and young people in this industry, the next generation,” Smith said.
sam johnson
“Both of us somehow realized that there was a huge niche missing within hospitality programs across the country,” Johnson said. “They are very focused on food industry management, hotel management, event management, but not so much on the travel and tourism sector, especially on the sales side.”
The exposure appears to be paying off, with about half of Red & Black Travel's interns already expressing interest in a career as a travel advisor.
Mentorship programs like this are key to meeting the growing demand for travel advisors.
Travel agency bookings soared in 2022 and 2023 with “unprecedented growth,” according to Phocuswright's U.S. Travel Agency Outlook 2023, released in January.
Focuslight also found that the number of new advisors is driving that growth (more than one-third of advisors surveyed for this report have been in travel sales for five years or less) The report also warns that knowledge gaps are at play. exist.
“The influx of new advisors reflects the health of the market and the continued attractiveness of travel sales,” the report states. “However, the absence of the most experienced advisors on the market also means there will be a lack of mentors to help new advisors learn the business, which makes training tools and opportunities especially important. ”
