About five years ago, Alysha Klein, a production manager in television, bought a Dream Vacations franchise. She enjoyed her job but felt overburdened. A lifelong traveler, Klein was drawn to the industry.
Alysha Klein
Klein worked part-time on the new travel franchise, based in Coral Springs, Fla. Although hit hard during the pandemic, business started picking up in recent years. Last October, she left television and made the jump to operating her travel agency full-time.
"I've loved every moment of it," Klein said.
Klein attributed a large part of her decision to being part of ASTA's first Mentorship Program. She applied on a whim last year after seeing an email, but the program -- and her mentor, Jenn Lee, president of Travel Planners International's new franchise venture, Vacation Planners -- were motivating factors in making advising a full-time profession.
Klein is not alone. ASTA launched the program in 2023 and said this year it will double the number of mentor-mentee pairs.
While still small -- there are 21 pairs for 2024 -- demand is high. Alvin Adriano, the Society's director of industry affairs, said the program draws hundreds of mentee applications. In its first year, 40 or 50 applied to be mentors, and 70-plus did so this year.
The mentorship program is part of an eight-step educational framework for advisors that the Society has honed in the past few years.
That revamp, and other such initiatives around the industry, come at a time when consumer demand for advisors is at an all-time high, and new entrants to the industry are coming in droves.
The Travel Institute said enrollment for its TripKit introductory training course, which is designed for new advisors, was up 20% in the first quarter of 2024 compared to the same period last year. Additionally, registrants for new-to-the-industry informational webinars was up slightly to 2,948 in the first quarter of this year compared to 2,913 last year.
"We've had so much feedback from every variety of players, from our own members to consortia to host agencies and more, about helping to build business," said Mark Meader, ASTA's senior vice president of industry affairs and education. "It's the shortfall that needs to be reckoned with and fixed."
Newer mentorship programs like ASTA's join more tenured ones in the industry with track records of success, like Brownell's Mentoring Program (the Birmingham, Ala.-based host agency is No. 44 on Travel Weekly's Power List).
The selective program, which has a 2% acceptance rate, is currently running its 28th and 29th classes.
"Interest in our Mentoring Program continues to grow, as well as the caliber of candidates," said Kerry Dyer, Brownell's chief development officer. Class 29 has three Ivy League graduates, two from Harvard Law School, she said.
Graduates from the program tend to see success. Dyer pointed to Christy Menzies of Menzies Luxe Retreats in Darien, Conn. A former Wall Street executive, Menzies sold more than $1 million in her mentoring year, and she was awarded Virtuoso's Rising Star Award in 2023.
A new mentorship program from Prescription Travel Group is targeting interns from the University of Georgia's hospitality program. The program is also being supported by Prescription's host agency, Montecito Village Travel.
Gayle Smith
Prescription's previous success with travel mentorships inspired the program: Lead travel advisor Sam Johnson connected with CEO and founder Gayle Smith via his own internship, and despite having job opportunities in the hotel sector, he opted to stay and make being an advisor a career.
The group modeled its new program, under Prescription's new Red and Black Travel division, off of Johnson's internship. It began this January with 12 interns learning all about the career of travel advising over the course of six months.
The internship is paid, and interns receive college credit and have the chance to sell travel in a supervised atmosphere.
"In this industry, it is a need to bring in new blood and the younger generation, that next generation," Smith said.
Sam Johnson
"We both kind of noticed there's a big niche within hospitality programs across the country missing," Johnson said. "They're very focused on food industry management, hotel operations, event management, but there's not a lot of focus within the travel and tourism sector, especially on the selling side of it."
The exposure seems to be working: about half of Red and Black Travel's interns have already expressed interest in having careers as travel advisors.
Such mentorship programs are being regarded as important in helping fulfill the increasing demand for travel advisors.
According to Phocuswright's U.S. Travel Agency Landscape 2023, published in January, agency bookings have soared with "unprecedented growth" in 2022 and 2023.
And while Phocuswright found that the number of new advisors was pushing that growth -- more than one-third of the advisors surveyed for the report indicated they had been selling travel for five years or less -- the report also cautions that a knowledge gap does exist.
"The influx of new advisors reflects the health of the market and continued appeal of selling travel," the report states. "However, the loss of the market's most experienced advisors also means a lack of mentors to help newer advisors learn the business. As a result, training tools and opportunities are particularly important."