Group Vice President of Marketing of sales and services for a CRS company, $175,000
Director of Systems and Operations for a large travel management services company, $85,000
Director of MIS for an airline, $66,000
Manager of Field Operations for a hotel company, $55,000
Manager of Systems Assurance for a hotel company, $45,000
Manager of Computer Operations for a travel agency, $30,000
This field will see phenomenal growth during the decade. A source of job leads in this area is the Information Industry Association. Trade publications also regularly follow technology developments and companies.
Research and Marketing
Seemingly trivial matters such as whether to change the number of seats in first class on an airplane, convert a floor in a hotel to make it exclusively for women, or introduce a tiered price structure for ski lift tickets can have vast financial consequence. Such decisions are not made without extensive market research. Research guides decisions such as whether a business should open at all, whether there is a niche for a company, whether there is sufficient demand to move into another's market, whether a "package" for the product (the brochure, direct-mail piece, hotel interior design) is effective, or what level of discount will stimulate sales and yield a profit as well.
As the travel industry has grown and become more sophisticated and more professional, the financial stakes have been raised. Consequently, a whole industry of professional research companies has sprung up to service travel companies, destinations, governments, and developers.
Generally, only the large companies can afford to support their own research staff person or department or to commission a study. But increasingly, even smaller entities are committing resources to research. The Hilton New Orleans Riverside and Towers, for example, employed its own research analyst. Research professionals are employed by airlines and other transportation companies, hotel companies, tourist offices, trade associations, advertising agencies, the consumer and trade press, in addition to being employed by specialized research companies.
The number of research companies specializing in travel and tourism has exploded in recent years. Many general companies, such as Gallup and Louis Harris, have also become active in the field. Most of the research firms dedicated to travel and tourism are small, but there are giants such as Pannell Kerr Foster, a company specializing in hotel research, which has offices world-wide and thousands of employees.
"We deal so much with the vice presidents of marketing of airlines, cruise lines, and the like," stated Stanley Plod, president of Plod Research, a large research company in Reseda, CA, which handles travel research projects among others and employs several hundred people. "You are at the heart of the dynamics of the industry. Markets are changing all the time."
Even before deregulation, change was constant. But then, there was certain predictability, even seasonality. Now, companies have to be able to respond sometimes the very same day to a competitor's initiative.
"Clients have to figure out how to position them," said Plod. "That's what research does. We help them develop a strategy. We help them think about the future in a different way. We help design new airplanes with the customer in mind. We work with cruise lines and destinations on how they should advertise themselves. We help developers design resort, help transportation companies create an appropriate fare structure."
Companies also need to monitor themselves to make sure they are "delivering" what is promised. To measure how well companies are accomplishing this, a research company may survey travel agents. Research can also tell clients whether travel agents are "delivering" for them effectively.
Research companies usually look for people with a back-ground in behavioral sciences and experimental methodology, statistics, or economics. Jobs include analysts, statisticians, interviewers, and computer specialists. The field also demands creativity. "You better be creative to survive," said Thomas Lea Davidson, principal of Davidson-Peterson Associates, Inc., New York. "Numbers are crunched by computer; people have to analyze them. We are not as concerned with statistics or research methods. We are concerned with personality-we look for a person who is brighter than average (this is a thinking business), willing to be involved in what we are doing, excited by the concept of research, inquisitive about why things work. They can have a tourism background."
Entry-level positions pay in the mid to high teens. Growth depends on ability. At senior levels, salaries are on par with a senior account executive in advertising agency.
One of the exciting aspects of working in research is that you develop proprietary information and deal with the client's top management. Consequently, the research organization can also be a steppingstone to other areas of travel. Project managers travel to the places being researched and, in fact, log many miles.
USTDC: The Pioneer in Travel Research
The U.S. Travel Data Center (USTDC), the pioneer of the field, is one of the premier travel research organizations. The nonprofit research company, now an affiliate of the Travel Industry Association of America (TIA), was founded in 1973 by Dr. Douglas C. Frechtling. He had been the chief of a team that designed and implemented the National Travel Expenditure Model for the federal government. He established USTDC with a mission to demonstrate the economic importance of travel and tourism to the nation.
At the time, the industry was faced with its most severe challenge. Federal legislators were calling travel "frivolous and nonessential" and were making the industry bear the brunt of measures to conserve energy. Mandatory gasoline station closings threatened to ruin thousands of hotels, motels, attractions, and tour companies. No one, least of all the legislators at the federal and state level, had any idea of the devastating impact such a law could have on the entire economy because they had no sense of the economic importance of the travel industry-how many jobs depended upon it, how much tax revenue was generated by it, and how whole communities could be bankrupted by such an assault on travel and tourism.
The data collected by USTDC was used as ammunition for a lobbying effort that led to legislation preventing any such discrimination against one industry ever again. It also was used to enhance the prestige, status, and even power of the travel industry.
"No one knew the length and breadth of the industry until we started measuring," said a spokeswoman. The data is now also used to support state efforts to obtain funding for tourism development and promotion.
The battle still goes on in current controversies over the government's moves to eliminate the tax deduction for business meals and overseas conventions. Its efforts to eliminate subsidies for Amtrak and funding for the U.S. Travel and Tourism Administration (USTTA) present further challenges.
Beginning in 1979, USTDC branched out from doing only economic research (measuring the economic impact of travel) into marketing research, allowing clients to add questions to its monthly national travel survey for a fee. USTDC now publishes 12 scheduled reports a year, a monthly newsletter, customized studies, and special subscriber surveys. It also conducts a summer vacation forecast, a travel outlook forum, and a travel review conference. This voluminous work is accomplished by only 13 people on staff, including 8 researchers, a media coordinator, a public relations assistant/secretary, a computer expert, and a marketing communications specialist.
USTDC staff personnel are responsible for refining the numbers and putting them in presentable form (the actual telephone interviews, data collection, and computer printouts are handled by another firm). They do not consider themselves "number- crunchers," however. "We consider ourselves part of the travel industry rather than part of the research industry," said the spokesperson. "We are exclusively dedicated to travel."
Mobility is limited in an organization like USTDC because it is so small. On the other hand, small organizations give people a lot of room to work. "You become what you become. You create your own position that fits your own characteristics and background."
USTDC receives from 5 to 10 resumes a month, many from students of travel and tourism (particularly from nearby George Washington University). 'There's no shortage of people. We take people with a research background and give them a travel background." With the growth in travel research methods at universities, however, research companies like USTDC will be looking for the specialized background.
