Travel agencies are experiencing a new kind of crisis: customer queries that should take minutes are stretching into hours or days. Your customers want instant answers but the average reply time for emails in travel is well over 12 hours, and many (70%) don’t even get a response.
This is more than just making customers happy, this is survival. Studies show that 62% of millennials will stop doing business with a brand after one poor customer service incident, and in the competitive travel industry, that lost customer is unlikely to become a repeat customer
Query Resolution is an end-to-end activity, from the time when a customer asks a query till they get a satisfactory answer. In travel, that includes everything from a basic booking confirmation to an intricate multi-city itinerary change.
Today’s customers have compressed expectations. Recent customer service statistics show that 90% of customers want an immediate response upon contacting a company while 60% consider “immediate” to mean within 10 minutes. But for travel agents, the lead time is much longer because of various industry issues.
The travel industry’s customer service performance reveals concerning gaps:
You can’t make improvements if you don’t know how your agency is stacking up to industry standards. Specialized travel benchmarks show huge disparities between various business models and operating specifics.
During peak periods, there are long delays through all areas. The figures demonstrate that average resolution times soar by 35-60% for all travel companies in the December holiday and summer seasons. The quickest resolution time occurs in January-February, with an average of 2.8 hours, but July-August and December are the slowest months with an average delay of 5.2 hours.
These benchmarks enable agencies to know how they compare and establish achievable targets for improvement that are relative to their unique operation.
Unlike e-commerce or software companies, travel agencies work in an industry full of suppliers and systems that do not talk to one another very well. When a customer books a holiday package, they’re not buying one service from one company they’re buying a complex bundle of services provided by multiple independent suppliers.
Travel agents turn into coordinators dealing with dozens if not hundreds of personal relationships at once. An average cancelled flight creates a domino of needed changes that may require hours to properly coordinate across all impacted ops.
To address slow resolution time efficiently, agencies also must have systematic processes to trace the causes of delays and reduce them. Most travel queries also fit into one of three broad categories, which pose distinct resolution challenges.
The process of diagnosis brings out the sources of delay in current workflows. GDS response time is around 3-8 seconds for a search which is quite okay. But, supplier portal access is up to 30-120 secs per login a big latency point.
Analysis of the communication channel reveals that there is considerable efficiency variation in resolution. The resolution time of single-channel is 4.7 hours on the average and multi-channel handoff delay is up to 2.1hours which are major problem factors. Add on escalation requirements and an additional 90 to 180 minutes per query is tacked onto resolution times.
Almost all travel agencies have GDS carriers like Amadeus, Sabre, and Travelport for booking management. These systems were created in the 1960s for airline reservations automation and never considered modern customer service expectations.
When a customer wants to revise their booking, agents have to log into multiple siloed systems. They conduct GDS searches of flights for potential alterations and fare changes. They consult separate hotel reservation systems for room availability. They search in multiple,car rental systems for ground transport solutions and pay through separate financial systems.
Agents complain that it feels like their sole function has transitioned to thrashing around in different systems. Reportedly, agents spend 3-5 minutes just querying systems with the intent of running a zero-assist query. Then they still need to spend additional time assisting the customer.
A typical travel agency will have information that is fragmented on multiple systems which are not speaking to each other effectively. This fragmentation causes a particularly long delay in response to queries.
This is hours of wasted time for an agency that receives hundreds of requests a day, all time that could be used to actually solve other customer problems. The combined effect will have a severe impact on resolution duration and agent productivity.
Even with technological advancements, travel operations are still based on many manual activities that slow the process of resolving a query. There is no automation and regular 2–3-minute changes can take anything from 30-45 minutes to complete, leading to backlogs that have even the simplest query rolling its way into the next day.
The travel sector has its own labor issues which have a direct effect on response times. Turnover rate in call centers can reach up to 44% annually, with travel agencies even more affected by it as systems are complex and product knowledge is needed.
New agents are generally not fully productive with GDS and travel industry knowledge until 3-6 months. They are slower during this learning phase and still need human oversight for those hard questions causing more customer disruption.
Inventory in travel is moving all the time, so it creates different pressure points around immediate closure. This change also means the information can be old by the time a customer is on a call.
Seat availability on airlines varies multiple time a day based on demand, and hotel room availability ebbs and flows with guests and walk-ins. Availability of car rentals based on return schedules and maintenance, or the volume tour op can accommodate due to weather and seasonal demand.
It becomes even more difficult as agents must inform the frustrated future facing customer about these limitations needing stability in their consideration time.
The customers of travel agencies are worldwide, but suppliers work in local time zones and hence they may have coordination problems which contribute to increased service times at different touch points.
Typical situations that cause busted trips to fall apart include clients on the East Coast who require European hotel help when suppliers aren’t available; business travelers having issues happen in Asia while their agency is based in North America, and itineraries with multiple destinations needing to be managed across time zones and different business hours.
Domestic travel is complicated even when trying to coordinate across regions and schedules. When necessary, all these geographic hurdles can add hours to resolution times if contact with the supplier is needed immediately.
When businesses do not execute query resolutions effectively, it adds to the problems for travel agencies. In 2023, 79% of business travelers globally encountered problems, and a significant number of them blamed agencies for their slow issue resolution processes, as the report suggested.
Agencies have become less competitive compared to more streamlined businesses due to the cumulative costs mentioned.
Proactive agencies are moving toward integrated technology solutions to target the fundamentals of resolution. All customer contact channels are integrated in centralized communication systems so that all customers can be managed in the same way, regardless of contact method.
Accor Plus has successfully applied AI chatbots and consolidated customer data, with impressive results. They realized a 220% gain in resolution times and a 20% increase in revenue by offering personalized service, and they offered customer support in multiple languages around the clock.
Making progress toward better query resolution requires day-in, day-out trackability via complete performance dashboards which deliver actionable intelligence tailored to travel operations.
Agent performance tracking creates a report card for every agent, which tracks the average resolution time of each agent in order to easily identify top performers and ongoing training requirements. First Contact Resolution rates & Measures system knowledge; customer pleasure scores direct quality to resolution outcome at individual level performance.
By means of Channel Efficiency Analysis we observe that such communication channels differ significantly. For Phone, agencies should aim for 12 minutes from the start of call to closure and a target 78% first-contact resolution and email-wise it’s in two hours with an average 65% one-touch email resolution. The average duration of a chat is 3 minutes, with an 85% success rate in resolving queries at real-time.
Achieving resolution improvement requires balancing short-term benefits with long-term impact, which is addressed with a phased approach.
This one is a system of interconnection. Over 3 – 12 months enhance existing system interconnections and manual editing. This could include unifying communication channels into a single hub, generating an API for GDS system direct interfacing, and automated workflows to reduce manual intervention on routine tasks.
Implement granular reporting combined with real-time automated performance improvement mechanisms.
Agencies can track the actual KPIs that drive success and assess them for resolution improvement.
Efficiency reporting includes cost per resolution trending down, agent utilization, maximized for productivity and quality, and automation rate increase on a quarterly basis. Doing these things is how organizations are able to pinpoint improvement areas and track ROI on their technology spending.
Resolution of slow queries by travel agencies is an operational problem in this case but also a competitive disadvantage in terms of customer retention and business growth. As is the case with suppliers and suppliers’ relationships and territories, travel is much more complex. However, when an agency enhances its resolution capabilities it modernizes its competitive advantage.
Today’s technology ensures significantly greater customer satisfaction, and in turn, significantly faster response and resolution times. Automation of resolution delays at the source, rather than the resolution of the symptoms, is made possible by AI, integration platforms, and centralized communication systems.
In this modern, connected and extremely competitive world, agencies that keep pace with customer expectations are able to gain greater and greater market share, relative to their competitors. Most agencies that are in the problem of obsolete methods will be greatly disadvantaged in the near future. All measures, however, in order to avoid slow resolution times, come at a cost.
Because travel involves multiple suppliers (airlines, hotels, car rentals, etc.) and disconnected systems, making coordination slow.
Supplier delays, outdated systems, fragmented data, staff turnover, and real-time inventory changes.
High booking volumes and limited supplier availability extend response times by up to 60%.
Legacy GDS and poorly integrated portals force agents to switch between systems, wasting time.
By using API integrations, AI chatbots, centralized platforms, and automation to cut manual work and speed responses.