It might be time for an organizational restructure
Like any organization going through an industry-wide evolution, travel agencies will likely need to adapt their organization structures and working practices to effectively introduce modern retailing capabilities. The scope of change will depend on an agency’s size and resources: larger agencies could introduce new teams or expand existing ones (e.g. retail experience, supplier partnerships, data science, customer relationship management). Smaller agencies with more limited resources could instead focus on redistributing responsibilities between existing team members, for example, marketing managers analyzing data deeper into the product funnel or support staff providing more tailored itineraries.
Regardless of agency size, it’s important for leaders to encourage more cross-functional collaboration, remove siloed processes, and introduce or reinforce agile and flexible work practices to respond to the dynamic nature of modern retailing. This means bringing together commercial, product, and technology expertise to design new or updated customer experiences and web/app user journeys, and empowering teams to make faster decisions, run more experiments, and regularly iterate.
