It is a scene played out every morning in countless travel support teams around the world. Check airline schedule changes. Process booking modifications. Update passenger details. Send confirmation emails. Handle cancellations. Issue refunds. Repeat. This loop of endless repetition is not only tedious it’s burning out your greatest asset: your team.
Gallup research shows that 77 percent of US workers have at some time suffered from burnout, and that 52 percent of voluntary exiting employees say they believed their company could have done something to prevent them leaving. The travel sector has to battle this even more than the general industry. New industry data reveals travel & hospitality achieved the highest average monthly turnover at 2.8%, well above education (1.8%) and finance (1.9%).
The primary “bad guy” that’s hidden right in front of our faces is the volume of repetitive administrative tasks that take up 70–80% of a travel agent’s day. These are not the creative, relationship-building activities that attracted people to the business of travel. They are Mindless, soul-killing tasks that could be performed by any or anything.
Nominally travel agents “advise” and “counsel” while assuring everyone that customers don’t pay them for their services because commission is built into the booking price. The reality is sobering. A travel agent will handle between 88-155 repetitive tasks per day, depending on the study, and this could take anywhere from 9.5 to 20 hours – yes, that math does mean that it requires constant overtime or some things going uncompleted.
*According to the average travel agent hourly rate of $20-$25/hour
These figures go a long way to explaining why agents are working overtime — and yet always feel hopelessly behind. When you have your team spending this much time doing repetitive tasks, there isn’t time for what really drives business: building client relationships and delivering the amazing travel experiences your clients know they can depend on you to provide.
It’s time to talk about money, because money is what managers pay attention to. Research indicate the cost to replace an employee is from one-half to two times their annual salary. This is financially destructive to travel agencies; most of whom never run the numbers to see what it costs them.
Take a standard 50-person travel agency with an average salary of $40,000. But what happens when you take into consideration hiring costs of $3,000 per employee on top of an additional $5,000 in onboarding and training expenses, as well as the fact that you lose $8,000 from lost productivity while a position is unfilled? At a 33.6% annual hotel industry turnover rate (2.8% monthly X 12), this agency is losing $268,800 to turnover each year alone. That’s more than a quarter-million dollars that might have gone toward automation tools, employee benefits or growing their business.
However, turnover is only the beginning. Studies have found that burned-out employees are 63% more likely to call in sick and 23% more likely to visit the emergency room. They commit more errors, deliver poorer customer service, and tarnish your agency’s reputation. When you consider these hidden expenses, the real cost of burnout from repetitive task is likely to exceed half a million dollars a year for a twenty-person agency.
The human brain is not made to repeat and repeat without end. When a travel agent is obliged to perform the same actions hundreds of times a week, something snaps inside them. Mental health studies find that job insecurity correlated positively with suboptimal mental health among tourism employees, and nothing breeds job-insecurity like feeling replaceable how tasks that are routinely the same make us feel.
Consider what occurs after an agent enters passenger names from email to booking system the 50th time in one day. The mind wanders, it starts wandering for that stimulation. This is not being lazy; it’s the brain protecting itself from a soul-crushing state of mindless boredom. But this mental checkout hasn’t actually worked, we’re now seeing higher rates of errors, lower quality in our product, and an even greater feeling that the work doesn’t matter.
Many travel agents start because they love helping people experience the world. They aspire to tailor bespoke trips, uncover off-the-beaten-path hotspots and give their clients the trip of a lifetime. Instead, they spend 80% of their time doing data entry and administrative work. This gulf between expectation and reality is not only a letdown, it crushes morale while fleeing good people from industry.
Each time flights are changed, or hotels are switched, a waterfall of repeating work follows. First, the Agent polls availability from multiple systems. They then shop prices, frequently doing the math themselves. Then it’s time to update passenger information, typing the same names and details onto different platforms that don’t talk to one another. Then they have to recalculate the costs, send new confirmations and update internal records.
Travel automation experts say one company said that “the man hours it has taken to manage a routine airline schedule change have been very costly.” After setting up this automation, they reduced that time by 85%, which allowed agents to concentrate on their strengths and collectively sell travel experiences while building long-term client relationships.
Findings show 74% of travel agents agree purchasing and selling itineraries may be simplified. Why? In large part because they respond to the same questions dozens of times a day. Which papers do I have to bring for Thailand? How much baggage for Emirates? Can I change my flight? What’s your cancellation policy?
Every answer involves pasting the same stuff, oft copied over from previous e-mails & documents. Agents are turned into human copy-paste machines as their creativity and problem-solving skills waste away. The irony is excruciating: these capable professionals who should be arranging dream vacations are instead typing “You must have a passport that’s valid for six months,” for the hundredth time this week.
Most current travel agencies do work with various platforms, often in silos. Industry analysis indicates that agents frequently navigate through a GDS system such as Sabre, or Amadeus and then move into managing the booking in a CRM (customer relationship management service), email systems, payment processors or document management tools. And none of the systems communicate very well with one another.
That is, every booking makes you enter the same details all over again. One passenger’s information could be manually entered into as many as five different systems. When anything changes , and in travel, something always changes , that update has to be manually entered into each of those systems individually. This time-stealing data entry slurps 2-4 hours per day out of each agent’s existence, doing nothing to have any value for customers and drains them as the will to go on from our agents.
It’s not hard to solve for burnout from repetitive tasks, but it does take a kind of commitment and a kind of strategy. Here’s how successful agencies are changing their operations for the better and sparing their teams from burnout.
Begin by taking a rigorous inventory of the world you now inhabit. Ask your agents to analyze their work for one week and identify every recurring task they perform. Don’t just count tasks add up their real cost with this calculation: average agent salary/2,080 hat’s the number of hours he works in a year multiplied by time spent on repetitive work. Add your existing turnover costs, and you probably will realize that you are hemorrhaging money you didn’t even realize you were losing.
After you have clarity on the scale of the issue, start with quick wins. Your top 20 FAQs email templates can retain each agent 1-2 hours daily. Studies demonstrate that 30% of hotel guests spend more after using a chatbot, and simple chatbots can already tackle frequently asked questions and check booking status or help with simple modification requests. These are not expensive remedies, and they alleviate immediately.
Next, tackle data integration. Through tools like Zapier, you can interconnect your disparate systems so you don’t have to enter the data twice and bring everything into one source of truth. This alone can save 2-3hrs per agent a day. Federal agencies employing RPA say they save tens of thousands of hours a year as automations based on robotic process automation handle airline schedule changes, automatically help with rebookings for routine scenarios, generate invoices and update multiple systems at once.
The most innovative agencies are beginning to implement AI-enabled solutions that leverage natural language processing to address complicated questions, predictively rebook trips that were interrupted and intelligently route requests to the appropriate experts. These are not science fiction they exist today and are changing how travel agencies work.
QBotic Service users have claimed to reduce their queue management workload by up to 85%. A mid-sized agency shared how it has been transformed: before automation, its agents were completing 150 repetitive tasks per day, turnover was at 3.2% monthly, agent satisfaction stood at only 45%, and average response time extended to 24 hours.
90 days into its strategic automation deployment, same agency witnessed repetitive tasks fall to 30 per agent daily, turnover plummet down to just 1.1% monthly, agent satisfaction soar to 78%, response times contract to within a mere two hours! They reduced turnover costs by $180,000 annually, increased productivity by 35%, and boosted revenue per agent by 28%, financially. They received back their full ROI in four months only.
The No. 1 mistake agencies do is trying to automate everything all at the same time. Research on implementation finds that 70% of rushed implementations do not succeed. Take on one operation, master it and go from there. Your agents will be able to make a more informed decision from there, and you’ll have learned something valuable without risking the entire operation.
Another serious mistake is failing to listen to the input of the staff. Exiting employees report management never inquired about their job satisfaction, according to Gallup, with 52%. Your agents know which activities burn them out the most, just ask them. Include them in automation decisions. Not only will they contribute valuable insights, but increasingly they’ll be ambassadors for change rather than opponents of it.
Finally, don’t be the one who only looks at technology to solve a particular challenge and overlooks culture. No amount of automation will make the transition work without consideration for the human side of change. You must re-design all job roles, invent new careers that are an exciting journey for your team and join your travel data entry clerks into the world of travel consultants.
The numbers don’t lie. With 83% of US adults booking travel online, consumer expectations have never been greater. For agencies inundated with tedious tasks, these standards are just unattainable without shattering morale and finances.
For your average 50-person agency the cost of doing nothing is over $268,800 in turnover per year. Full automation is going to run them between $50,000 and $100,000 a tiny portion of what you’re already losing. Research reveals, Software robots could potentially reduce cost by 40-75%, but the real power goes beyond savings! It’s about turning your agency from a burnout factory into a place where talented people can thrive.
Your agents didn’t enter the travel industry to sit and copy/paste passengers names all day. They joined to help people discover the world, to create adventures, to fulfil dreams. The technology exists now to save them from rote work and let them do what they enjoy. The only question is whether you will go along with that now or will keep watching your best people burn out and resign.
Every day you hesitate costs one more day of needless pain for your team, one more day of subpar service to your customers and another opportunity lost to those competitors who have already taken the leap. The answer to burnout from repetitive tasks isn’t simply a technological one ,it ’s about caring enough for your team to provide them work that’s important.
Copying and updating booking details, reconfirming flights/hotels, handling standard traveler queries, issuing invoices/vouchers, and processing cancellations/refunds.
Agents spend 70–80% of their day on repetitive tasks, wasting 9–20 hours per week per agent, costing $15k–$25k annually per agent, plus hidden costs from turnover and errors.
Monotonous work leads to cognitive fatigue, boredom, reduced focus, more errors, low engagement, and higher attrition.
AI-powered booking reconfirmations, automated ticketing/invoicing, chatbots for FAQs, and data integration to remove duplicate entries.
Start small with high-volume tasks, involve employees, train staff on automation, redesign roles for value-added work, and monitor/refine progress.
Travel Automation Expert
