TTG’s latest Travel Agent Tracker survey data revealed how getting "getting hold of suppliers" now ranked as the biggest issue currently facing agents’ businesses, with nearly half experiencing difficulties.

Several respondents detailed frustrating experiences when dealing with suppliers, including long call wait times, staff shortages and training gaps.

Shona Thorne, director of Thorne Travel in Kilwinning, said in her experience, a number of suppliers were struggling to adequately staff their sales and reservations teams, adding some were lacking the knowledge and experience to serve agents quickly and effectively.

“I spoke to someone who didn’t know Qantas and Emirates code-shared," she said. "The person actually didn’t even know who Qantas were, which is quite scary when you’re phoning a flights person."

Thorne added call wait times had worsened significantly of late, with routine five-to-10-minute calls turning into three-day waits. “It’s not great when you’ve waited an hour-and-a-half and only to get through to someone just fielding calls who says they’ll get someone to call you back within the next three days.”

Thorne put the challenges down to the industry being understaffed, and a lot of new staff being recently hired and undertrained. “Suppliers need to ask themselves are they putting in overtime, training schools – they need to look at what they can do.”

Hannah Porter, managing director of Marlborough-based Travel by Hannah, said she had been surprised by some of the training issues she had experienced.

“I called a specialist operator for Italy yesterday, a luxury operator, and the person didn’t know Forte Village in Sardinia. I was thinking, ’you should really know that one’,” she told TTG.

Porter said she too had found call wait times an issue, describing them as “absolutely atrocious” with one – just to make an amendment – taking up six hours of one of her team’s day.

She said this was interfering with efforts to make new bookings. “We’re lucky we have a couple members of staff because if you had one phone line, you couldn’t do your job," she said. "You’d be on hold with a supplier thinking, ’can I answer that ringing on the other line?’.”

Porter added the most effective way to get hold of suppliers was becoming less clear, with email often being offered in lieu of calls.

“Emails aren’t being responded to for three days so they shouldn’t say email, or call if emails are a lesser priority," said Porter. "Suppliers should allocate a couple members of staff to focus on the email inbox to alleviate that pressure.”

’Nothing’s perfect’

Amanda Matthews, managing director of Designer Travel, said clients were asking for a lot of amendments to bookings, which was taking longer than expected to process compared to pre-pandemic levels.

However, she said this had been the norm for the past six to 12 months. “Our relationship with suppliers is really strong. We understand some of our suppliers are short staffed, so have to be more patient,” she told TTG.

Matthews said more was being asked of agents, but that was just the current landscape. “It’s the overall effort that needs to go in to making sure that a holiday goes smoothly, that’s time consuming. Sometimes, if suppliers are understaffed, we’re getting tickets later.

“I think it’s top down though, I don’t think there’s any part of the travel industry that can say travel levels are perfect.”