PHILADELPHIA — Over the past five years, Natalie Contrera has traveled from her West Philadelphia home to Colombia, Belize, Puerto Rico, Jamaica, and the Dominican Republic twice. She soon hopes to visit Egypt and Lebanon, her family’s homeland.
The 35-year-old’s secret to planning and affording so many excursions since the pandemic?
A travel agent.
“I give her a budget. I give her a couple countries I want to go to,” said Contrera, who owns a branding agency. On each vacation, she and her partner have spent between $1,500 and $3,000 per person.
The travel agent “is organizing an entire trip for us. And if things go wrong — that is also what they are there for,” Contrera said. “Why would I ever plan it myself again?”
With people vacationing more than they did before the pandemic, travel agents are as popular as ever, if not more so. The national trend is mirrored across the Philadelphia region, with several local travel agents saying 2023 was their best year in recent memory.
The continued surge is welcome news to the industry after the pandemic ground business to a halt in 2020. It also comes as agents have heard warnings for decades that the internet and technology will make them obsolete. Now it looks like the prognosticators were wrong.
“We are extremely busy,” said Pam Draper, owner of Travel with Pam Draper in Washington Township, Pa., and a 47-year veteran of the industry who remembers the temporary dip in sales that came after the internet’s rise. “It’s amazing really.”
Gen Z and millennial consumers, who are 43 and younger, are fueling the industry’s growth. Of travelers in these generations, 38 percent prefer to use a human travel agent over online booking services, according to a December survey of 2,000 U.S. adults conducted by IBS Software. Only 12 percent of Gen X-ers, who are in their 40s and 50s, and 2 percent of Baby Boomers, who are 60 and older, reported using traditional agents.
“What I’m finding with the millennial and the Gen Z generations is they’re overwhelmed with the information online. They don’t know what to do with all of it,” said Jennifer Byrne, CEO and luxury vacation specialist at The Tropical Travelers, in Malvern, Pa.
“The honeymooners that I get, they go, ‘I just went crazy online,’” said Paul Ferdinand, president and travel adviser at Philadelphia-based Rainbow Voyages. “The first thing they say is they went online and couldn’t get offline. They just went down the rabbit hole” of vacation research.
Travel agents work on commission from hotels and other vendors, and many charge consumers nothing for their services. Other agents charge fees that range from $150 for an initial conversation (they say they do so in case someone takes their recommendations and books the trip on their own, losing the agent the commission) to $500 or more for planning a destination wedding.
Some consumers say they’re willing to pay a fee if it means saving time.
“I would rather pay someone than me be scouring the internet for hours,” trying to plan a certain trip within a certain budget, said Meghan Mack, a 35-year-old nurse who lives in Philadelphia. She plans to employ a travel agent for future international trips after using one for a stress-free 30th birthday trip to Greece and Italy in 2019.
While some clients are on strict budgets, local agents said plenty of their younger clients seem willing to spare no expense on their vacations, one of many experiences consumers are prioritizing more since the pandemic. That means higher commissions for agents.
Byrne said she finds herself “wondering if people have more money in their 20s or their 30s than they did previously.” She requires that clients have a minimum budget of $3,000 per person, but many of her clients are spending $15,000 or more.
These trips can include multiple flights, hotels, and unique excursions, and are often inspired by friends or social-media influencers who have posted about similar far-flung adventures on TikTok or Instagram.
Clients are demanding these complex itineraries at the same time that prices are as high as ever, local agents said, with some top hotels in hot destinations having doubled or even tripled their rates since the pandemic.
“The money people are spending to have custom vacations is unbelievable,” Byrne said. “They’re seeing these things on Instagram and TikTok and they want to do these trips.”
‘Not the corner travel agency anymore’
Travel agencies have evolved over time to meet the changing needs of new generations of jet-setters. The businesses that weathered the pandemic were in many ways primed to meet the surging demand that came after the lifting of restrictions and hasn’t let up in the years since.
When Ferdinand, of Rainbow Voyages, started in the travel industry about five decades ago, storefront travel agencies were common in retail corridors and shopping malls. Inside, agents often sat behind desks, ready to sell vacations that were largely preplanned. He recalled working at one of these agencies.
“When I was in the mall, I had 10 brochures in my drawers,” he said. “And when people came in, almost everything people were looking for was in those 10 brochures.”
Today, people want a more personalized vacation, said Ferdinand, who specializes in honeymoons and LGBTQ+ travel.
“Because of Instagram, people want to send pictures to their friends of bizarre places,” he said. “Iceland isn’t good enough. They want to go to the Faroe Islands. … They want their picture taken biting into a fish head on the top of a cliff in the Faroe Islands,” volcanic islands between Iceland and Norway.
For vacations to Hawaii, Mexico, the Caribbean, and Europe, his clients now pay $1,200 a night on average, up from about $500 to $600 a night for similar accommodations in 2019.
Rebecca Wzorek, a travel specialist at Mad Hatter Adventures Travel Company in Newtown Square, Pa., said her growing number of millennial and Gen Z clients “are a little bit more outside the box, a little bit more unique” in terms of what they want in a vacation.
“Since the pandemic, we’re seeing people taking the bucket-list vacation,” she added.
In Wzorek’s decadelong career, 2023 was “by far” her busiest year, she said, and 2024 is already on pace to beat it.
But agents said they know they have to keep adapting.
After being introduced to TikTok by her teenage son during the pandemic, Byrne started posting travel tips and all-inclusive recommendations on the platform. Now, her account, @thetropicaltravelers, has nearly 198,000 followers. The online popularity has allowed her to expand her client base geographically and economically, far beyond the affluent Main Line.
She can see who is watching her videos (a lot of women over 45), and has noticed that many of her viewers want to know how to vacation on a tighter budget. Her most popular video, which has 2.2 million views: “My Top 3 affordable family all-inclusive resorts.”
“It is not the corner travel agency anymore, with the older women sitting there waiting for you to walk in,” Byrne said. “Today it’s, ‘OK I need to understand what you want.’”
As even more Gen Z and millennial consumers use travel agents, and have positive experiences, agents said they hope those clients will recommend travel professionals to friends — and debunk misconceptions about the profession.
In West Philly, Contrera admitted that she had some of these misconceptions before using a travel agent for the first time.
“Travel agents felt very outdated,” she said. “They felt like it was only about an all-inclusive resort after your honeymoon.”
But, she said, she learned that’s not the case anymore.
