Industry Insights
New Travel Sisterhood Bands Together for Support, Advocacy
Gandhi once said, “Be the change you wish to see in the world.” It’s one thing to complain about pain points with your colleagues, it’s another thing entirely to do something about it. One distinct group of luxury travel advisors is looking to face the many challenges the industry presents for agency owners – including branding, knowledge sharing, and chasing commissions.
by Jacques Ledbetter
It all started in Rome.
On a cloudy, chilly day in February of 2023, about a dozen of luxury travel’s leading ladies – all travel agency owners – strolled into an event at the Private Luxury Forum. After having a conversation around the table about various challenges in the industry, one of them – Nadine Brady of Limelight – made the first move and set up the WhatsApp group.
While a WhatsApp group itself is pretty ordinary, this group’s concept “was fiery from the beginning” says Rebecca Puttock, CEO of Wanderlux Experiential Travel, based out of the UK.
“It started with things like, ‘Do you know anyone at this hotel,’ or ‘Has anyone visited this property,’ but on top of taking care of our clients and connecting with new industry partners, there was also ranting and raving from anything about payment systems, specific hotels, new openings, product knowledge, events, fam trips… it became a community in its own right,” she says.
The fundamental idea was to create a safe place for info sharing and support for their businesses, which were still trying to recover from the pandemic. Over the next year, the group swelled to 60 members as people invited other similarly-minded colleagues. That’s when Brady and other leaders realized they might be onto something.
By February of 2024 – exactly a year after the group’s inception – 25 of them showed up to attend their first official face-to-face event at the Nobu in London. “It was a real statement of opportunity. We’re all travel business owners, with our own extensive experience, knowledge, and connections," says Puttock.
And so dawned the Travel Sisterhood, a significant example of a growing trend in the travel industry – after decades of relative fragmentation, the buyers are organizing. Blocs of agencies are grouping up more than ever outside the consortia – not just for info sharing or support, but for advocacy.
It was at that meeting in London where the Sisterhood formed an inner circle, created a Code of Conduct, and decided to migrate to Slack so they could operate more efficiently on individual channels about anything from resources, branding, and knowledge sharing – including data to spot both positive and negative patterns in the industry.
They also mapped out a social media plan, and created the logo as well as application forms for entry. “We also want to evolve the website for – among many other things – hosting webinars for our particular niches, and for promoting women in travel,” says Puttock. Last May, the Travel Sisterhood went public with their existence and their stances on various issues in the industry.
Entrepreneur Rebecca Puttock believes in strength in numbers, as well as advocacy for positive change.
While the original WhatsApp group is capped at 60 for Founding Members, they now host a membership of more than 80 across the Americas, Europe, India, Australia, and Asia-Pacific. “There are some real forces in that group,” says Puttock. “The idea behind it is that – especially for independent agents – to have strength in numbers. We're sharing knowledge, expertise, and it's a very give-and-take environment. There is a vetting process for entry, so everyone has a similar mindset, experience, background, reputation, and authenticity that contributes to the group,” she says.
The Sisterhood's collective buying power, Puttock conservatively estimates, is somewhere north of €100 million.
“There are all these topics that I’ve been dealing with solo and battling through for years, but that nobody listens to because I’ve got no significant buying power on my own. But when I started talking to these other ladies, all of a sudden we found each other in the same situation. So now together we’ve got buying power, and we’ve got a voice.”
And a strong one at that. “We’ve been writing collective letters as the Travel Sisterhood to hotels who haven’t been paying commissions – or arguing/fighting about them – to let the hotels know that their behavior is unacceptable. We’re backed by 80+ agents now to say to these hotels need to reconsider their responses to these situations, and if they don’t find a reasonable solution that we could potentially boycott their brand,” reveals Puttock.
Collective bargaining and organization, in general, is more about correcting imbalances in any industry, and this is only one small aspect of membership. The Travel Sisterhood is more about building a community that enables a safe space for personal and professional growth. At the end of the day, the aim is to foster stronger business relationships that help everyone prosper.
"We’ve been taking a much more constructive approach," says Puttock. "The idea is that we’re trying to educate and better the industry by suggesting alternatives to the way things are currently done, because eventually it’s going to have a big effect on the bottom line. Ultimately, the decision is up to the supplier.”
This kind of advocacy is especially timely since the overall demand for travel advisors is increasing globally. On top of that it’s been an especially busy summer for agencies across the board, so pain points with delays in commission payments – among other issues – is especially acute. At the same time, that increase in demand – and therefore resources – has given travel agencies even more buying power to amplify their message.
“I think now is the right time to be challenging companies and practices that involve third parties because the way things are currently set up is not right,” says Puttock. “It’s not okay – this is our livelihoods, our mortgages, our families, our lives – and we work hard for it. And just like any industry, we should be remunerated fairly, and timely. The first step is acknowledging there’s a problem. The second is answering ‘how do we work together.’”
The data and trends that the Sisterhood collects stand to benefit hotels as well, rewarding properties that are especially good at processing payments, or are standouts for exceptional service, food, or personalization for example.
“The luxury level [of a client] through a travel agent is usually much higher in quality. Hotels have historically wanted quantity, but now we’re seeing a shift where hotels are starting to appreciate higher-quality, repeat clients,” observes Puttock. “They’re better because they’re booking higher suites, longer stays, spending more money in-house… and all of a sudden the hotel’s value doesn’t just go up, it multiplies. We’re also getting to a point where there’s a critical mass of people in the industry who now understand that.”
Puttock and the rest of the Travel Sisterhood are indeed gaining momentum, as they host events quarterly and are completely booked out for the rest of this year. They are now planning – and booking – many for 2025.
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