MyPortfolio
Call Us
Open Menu
Actively looking for employment or thinking about a change soon? We are always looking for good people for a variety of roles!
Sometimes the stars align right away, with open positions and good timing. Or, there’s a great match but the timing isn't right for one or both parties. Let’s chat anyway, all calls are kept confidential! No resume prepared? No problem!
Actively looking for employment or thinking about a change soon? We are always looking for good people for a variety of roles!
Sometimes the stars align right away, with open positions and good timing. Or, there’s a great match but the timing isn't right for one or both parties. Let’s chat anyway, all calls are kept confidential! No resume prepared? No problem!
Pre-pandemic, tripcentral.ca had 26 retail locations in Ontario and Atlantic Canada, and many of those stores were in high rent locations. While this model worked for us for decades, the pandemic dealt a blow to this business model – not only to us, but many of our competitors (including international chains and independently owned local travel agencies).
Fortunately for us, we have our popular and unique website with a loyal following, aimed at Canadian leisure travellers. Our agents were mostly setup to work from home pre-pandemic and we were slowly incorporating remote work. We started training on Zoom a couple of years before the pandemic– a superior method that allowed new hires to learn without having to be away from home, and also at a pace that was more sustainable.
Fortunately, we are no longer constrained by the geography of our former locations and required store hours, and we want the BEST people with the BEST experience for our customers, regardless of where they live. Our customers come from all regions of Canada, and our Agents can to! Email us or for a confidential discussion, call our Recruitment Manager Kevin Quin at 905-515-0113.
How many hats can one Agent possibly wear? We know the role of a traditional travel agent is nearly impossible to perfect.
You’re expected to be:
We have invested millions into our systems, and we have split the functions of traditional travel agents into areas of specialty. We have people that are excellent with detail and process, and they perform functions at high levels of accuracy and efficiency. Some examples include:
Our sales agents are highly successful because of our agent support people and our ever-improving systems. Over the last 30 years we’ve invested heavily in the development of our technical systems and departmental processes. We are continuously working to improve these to provide a better agent experience. Our most successful sales agents use these systems to the maximum and trust their support peers to deliver. Those who prefer to manage more of the detail are limited by time in their ability to sell more – this is a question of preference.
Our customers value well-travelled advice, and to deliver this, you must have experienced travel for yourself. Not everyone in travel is, and we have many top performers that had limited experience to start. The more you have travelled-the bigger the leg up to higher earnings and satisfaction.
Our sales agents get 4 weeks’ vacation on hiring. It does not go up from there, but our volume with suppliers means many fam opportunities are presented to us. Right now we are challenged in that we are turning down opportunities because we need our agents on the phones! We have also designed our own familiarization trips on many occasions to give a less biased view of a destination than a supplier fam, by curating many of our own hotel inspections. Further, we have strong relationships with tourist boards, cruise lines, coach tour companies and hotel chains directly.
High sales volume means a lot of loyalty points – our top performers often have more than they can meaningfully use for their own personal travel. And our Christmas parties are legendary – where we have an insane number of trips for random giveaway. Combine all of this, along with our top performer trips, and we have one of the most well-travelled teams in the business.
Then, like magic, we market YOUR experience on our website. You get calls and leads from multi-million-dollar advertising with prospects enquiring about destinations, cruise lines, hotel chains and properties that you have visited - “Agents Who’ve Been There”. This increases your ability to close sales and further incentivizes you to travel more. It’s a winning combo, and the prospective customer gets an extremely well-travelled agent with first-hand experience.
Pre-pandemic, the company experienced a 2% cancellation rate, and much of the softer aspects of service were left between our sales agents and customers. The massive waves of cancellations and schedule changes during the pandemic challenged us to add even more resources to agent support and administration. It was an “all hands-on deck” approach at every level of our management to minimize the impact on our customers – a daunting task with over ten thousand cancellations turning to future travel credits (angering our customers, but beyond our control), to rebooking, cancelling again, and ultimately refunding almost the same amount. While our agents bore the brunt of understandably angry customers calling, we quickly routed calls to a team dedicated to supporting this function. This allowed our agents to keep selling more than our competitors.
Are you happier providing service to customers and feeling their satisfaction, or are you electrified when you make bookings for customers and almost live vicariously through your client’s booking? It’s not an either or, but it is a continuum – some are more motivated by delivering service, and others’ sales, and many have not really thought about it. It’s a discussion we can have and explore together in our initial conversation. Call our Recruitment Manager Kevin Quin at 905-515-0113.
One of the challenges that every travel agency has faced, is that sales are easier to measure than service. Long term, good and excellent service means a higher repeat customer factor and higher levels of sales. If an agent could have only repeat customers, the sales would be highest, as a higher percentage of time would be spent booking rather than persuading for the first sale.
High sales performers can “cut corners” chasing higher sales. We’ve built systems around this human reality to prevent that from happening. Mandatory fields, data integrity checking, systems, and our support people will minimize the lack of detail that people-oriented people naturally exhibit.
The sheer volume of work stemming from waves of the pandemic forced us to implement more rigorous systems for prioritizing and completing service-oriented tasks on time. Upon receiving hundreds of schedule changes on a given day, these had to be viewed, prioritized by departure date and severity to our customer experience and worked through. At the same time, changes with moderate impact cannot be ignored as new tickets had to be checked and sent out in a timely manner.
A newly adopted system will allow us to measure services of different time and complexity, as well as customer satisfaction with their completion. This will allow us to recognize and reward service like we could for sales for the first time. It will correct an imbalance of reward and recognition only on sales that was tolerable with a 2% cancellation rate and an assumed long-term view by agents of “excellent service brings higher long-term sales”.
No matter how good our internal systems and people are, we all face a significant barrier with our suppliers’ staffing levels and quality of staff. While we cannot overcome this directly, anything we do to handle it better than average helps us win in this environment. Our strategy includes:
We need the best people for these roles, and after understanding our philosophy and approach, consider how your strengths can be leveraged for our customers and YOUR job satisfaction:
At one time we had a staff of over 100 agents spread across Ontario and Eastern Canada. Most staff will get to know one another mostly via our internal chat system and Fam trips. We also bring everyone together in person at various company events held throughout the year with our themed Christmas Parties always being the most memorable.
We have long time employees that have been with the company for more than 25 years. Eventually staff starts to feel like family. We like to foster a work hard atmosphere, but we also know when to kick back, laugh and have fun!
Email us or for a confidential discussion, call our Recruitment Manager Kevin Quin at 905-515-0113.
