Alex Eaton, CEO of World Travel in Tulsa, Oklahoma, is on a personal mission to eradicate the term “leisure” from the travel industry’s vernacular.
“For me, the word ‘leisure’ is just doing nothing,” Eaton said, adding that it connotes leisure suits — “not a good look, not a good vibe” — and retirement communities, which often use the term leisure in their names.
The CEO prefers the term “vacation,” and that’s the portion of World Travel’s business that he and president Matt King are working to build.
The agency currently has a business mix of about 75% corporate travel and 25% leisure (sorry, Alex). World Travel recently reorganized its leadership, with Eaton moving from president to CEO and King from executive vice president to president, all to further the goal of growing the World Travel Vacation Department.
“Matt and I both want to have a little more balance in the work portfolio, from our profit standpoint, from a revenue-generating standpoint,” Eaton said. “If the pandemic taught us anything, being super reliant on one side of the business — groups, corporate or vacation — is a recipe for potential disaster.”
Ideally, Eaton said, vacation travel would make up 40% to 45% of World Travel’s business, something he and King hope to achieve with a two-pronged approach.
First, they plan to bolster the agency’s leisure advisor infrastructure. For corporate travel, for example, there are processes in place for managing airline schedule changes and unused tickets. But the agency’s leisure advisors are doing things “soup to nuts,” Eaton said, which he believes can be streamlined with better processes and procedures. That could include an air desk.
“They’re professionals,” Eaton said. “They do an amazing job. The best thing that we can do is get them freed up to spend more time on the phone with our customers and helping them.”
Second, they want to develop new talent in-house as employees, not via onboarding more independent contractors. That strategy bucks the host agency/IC model that has proliferated in vacation travel in recent years, but it’s one Eaton said he believes in. While World Travel does have a handful of ICs, Eaton said, they are mostly former employees who are semiretired.
The agency now has around 68 full-time employees and plans to add more leisure advisors to the mix. Eaton said it would take 18 to 24 months before those new advisors start generating revenue.
“We understand that, and our goal is to find the right people to invest in and make it very clear to them that we’re investing in them, we’re investing in their future, in part because we’re investing in the company’s future,” he said.
Eaton doesn’t have a specific goal for the number of advisors who will focus on vacation travel, but World Travel plans to hire five or six people in the next six months. He is looking for advisors who will not only sell travel well but fit into World Travel’s culture as good teammates.
The push for more vacation sales is the latest evolution for World Travel, which has gone through a number of changes since its founding in the late 1950s as a tour operator taking Midwesterners to the Northeast on fall foliage trips.
Eaton and his father, Len, purchased the agency in 1997, and King joined 17 years ago. In 2021, World Travel rebranded from World Travel Service.
World Travel plans to continue supporting and growing its corporate business. Its target clients are small and medium-size enterprises with annual travel budgets under $20 million. The corporate business has grown organically over the years, something King said he expects will continue.
World Travel also has been investing in AI to streamline processes.
“We find ourselves being high tech and high touch,” said King, who is a believer in the right blend of “people, content, process, tech.”
“You’ve got to have the right mixture,” he said, “but we really want to always lean into the human side of that.”
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