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GUEST

The Internet and e-mail are leading to the demise of face-to-face contact. However, this should not mean the end of important, traditional methods of communication.

Gillian downer

I detect a growing tendency for people to use e-mail for the simplest of messages rather than pick up the telephone and talk. Indeed, I even know of an organisation where people at adjoining desks e-mail each other, rather than speaking – and they haven’t even had an argument!

This is one of the reasons why the activities of the Truly Independent Professional Travel Organisation are so valuable. We get to meet real people and talk to them face to face. This is still very important in the travel industry.

We are, as we hear so often, a people business. Therefore, it is vital we keep a regular dialogue going with people that really count. That, of course, especially means frontline travel agents.

They are not going to learn the nuances of our business, let alone the basics, from a computer screen.

They need to interact, discuss, ask questions and talk.

The recent development of a step-by-step training manual, the TIPTO Fam Guide, really proves this point.

Every month TIPTO agents are visited by our team of trained merchandisers, who deliver the latest installment of their product guide.

In stages, it builds into a comprehensive product and sales guide on behalf of all our 25 members.

The merchandisers also deliver relevant sales messages and gain valuable feedback for the operators from the agents.

We are able to build on these foundations with our regular series of roadshows staged around the country during the year, where again representatives of our member companies meet travel agents face to face.

For a company such as Gold Medal, TIPTO effectively provides an expanded nationwide sales force that enhances our own existing coverage. We achieve personal contact and we treat the feedback we receive from agents via merchandisers very seriously. Every single report is followed up by a phone call.

Now there’s something that is really out of this dot-com world.

ust because we have new tools, such as the Internet, with which to work, traditional methods of communication do not have to be consigned to the scrap heap

Many notable figures within the travel industry – and one or two respected additions outside of it – have been urging us all to warmly embrace the e-commerce developments that continue to grow apace.

To adopt an ostrich-like attitude to what is going on around us in the dot-com world would, at the very least, be foolhardy.

While I believe that some aspects of the Internet and its spin-offs are somewhat over-rated and may never make the impact their promoters claim, we must accept that electronic communication and business transactions are becoming more dominant. But, like most things in life, this has to be put in perspective.

The arrival of a new tool with which to work does not automatically mean that some of the older, more established methods of communication should be ditched.

One of the worries I have is that the Internet and e-mail will become a veil behind which people hide.

I detect a growing tendency for people to use e-mail for the simplest of messages rather than pick up the telephone and talk. Indeed, I even know of an organisation where people at adjoining desks e-mail each other, rather than speaking – and they haven’t even had an argument!

This is one of the reasons why the activities of the Truly Independent Professional Travel Organisation are so valuable. We get to meet real people and talk to them face to face. This is still very important in the travel industry.

We are, as we hear so often, a people business. Therefore, it is vital we keep a regular dialogue going with people that really count. That, of course, especially means frontline travel agents.

They are not going to learn the nuances of our business, let alone the basics, from a computer screen.

They need to interact, discuss, ask questions and talk.

The recent development of a step-by-step training manual, the TIPTO Fam Guide, really proves this point.

Every month TIPTO agents are visited by our team of trained merchandisers, who deliver the latest installment of their product guide.

In stages, it builds into a comprehensive product and sales guide on behalf of all our 25 members.

The merchandisers also deliver relevant sales messages and gain valuable feedback for the operators from the agents.

We are able to build on these foundations with our regular series of roadshows staged around the country during the year, where again representatives of our member companies meet travel agents face to face.

For a company such as Gold Medal, TIPTO effectively provides an expanded nationwide sales force that enhances our own existing coverage. We achieve personal contact and we treat the feedback we receive from agents via merchandisers very seriously. Every single report is followed up by a phone call.

Now there’s something that is really out of this dot-com world.