After you have completed your certification, you are now ready to start selling travel. However, before you can legally trade travel products and services, you must be associated with an IATA registered entity. Travel Agents sell travel through travel agencies or host agencies. When you join a host agency, they will give you access to the use of their IATA registration number. This number will ensure that you are paid commissions by vendors when you sell their product. However, that is not the only thing your host agency will do for you. Let’s take a look at some of the additional value travel agents get from belonging to a host agency.

Training & Support

The information you get from your certification will provide you with general knowledge and guidelines regarding trading in the travel industry, but that training will not prepare you on how to go out and get customers. Your host agency is your ongoing knowledge base of business building tools and resources that you will need to continue growing your business and remain competitive. Your host agency also provides you with administrative support, such as client invoicing, commission tracking, marketing resources, etc. Your host agency is your support system that will hold your hand through the first phase of your business as you learn the ins-and-outs of becoming a successful travel specialist.

Customer Leads

It is a bad idea to completely rely on any one person or organization to send you customers for your business. You will only find success in the travel industry if you understand that the burden of going out and finding customers is solely resting on your shoulders. However, most host agencies have some form of consumer lead generation system that they use to find leads for their travel agent members. It’s way more rewarding to find your own customers, but free business is always a nice bonus.

Vendor Relationships

When you are new, you have no connections or credibility with vendors so you most likely will not be getting any special favors from them. New travel agents get to leverage the relationships of their host agency to gain access to preferred pricing and better commission rates as well also familiarization tours for you to travel at discounted rates and learn about products.

Resources

To setup your business to operate as a true travel professional, you will need access to several tools and resources. You will require access to GDS accounts, Consortiums, business management and invoicing tools and most importantly, a consumer booking website. Without a host agency, most of these things are not accessible to you, and the ones that are, will cost you a fortune and wasted time to setup your own. Your host agency should already have all those things in place so you can seamlessly integrate into their system and start selling travel right away.

Joining a host agency is not free. In most cases, you will have to pay both a setup and a monthly fee to join. When you sell travel under a host agencies IATA number, the vendor will pay the host agency, not the travel agent. Your host agency will take a portion of that commission and pay you the rest. The average commission split between a travel agent and a host agency is 70/30. That means, the travel agent gets 70% of the total commission earned, and the host agency takes 30%. There are many scenarios where the host agencies will take more, and there are also scenarios where the travel agent gets a higher percentage, but this is normally in a situation where the travel agent has a large volume of annual sales or is paying a higher amount in monthly fees to the host agency.