Like so many facets of the travel industry, there is an over-supply of people looking for entry-level jobs but an undersupply of experienced people. Salary levels reflect supply and demand. Research is just as much an art as a science, and people who have a talent are well paid.
There is no shortage of people to handle the peripheral jobs, those that require mainly rote and manual work. True researchers, who are able to create a study and interpret the results, are in short supply, however.
TTRA handles some job referrals, mostly in the academic arena. Its meetings and conferences bring together marketing and research people from all the companies and entities that employ them-airlines, hotel chains, car rental companies, universities and colleges, destinations, advertising agencies, consumer and trade publications; it does, therefore, provide a network for job-hopping. So far, only a few companies offer internships.
Preparation for this work should involve academic courses in economics, statistics, and research methods. Some of these courses are included in travel and tourism programs. It is much easier coming into travel research as a research professional rather than as a travel professional.
Advertising
Advertising agencies become intimately involved in the marketing strategy of a travel and tourism client (airline, hotel, tour operator, car Rental Company, cruise line, or destination). They are very much at the heart of a debate over whether travel can be marketed like soap, a dream, or a service. They must be sensitive to changing lifestyles, values, demographics, and whether "cheesecake," "beefcake," and sun-and-sand are the way to sell the Caribbean or whether culture, sports, or some other theme would be more persuasive. They decide how the client should be positioned in the marketplace-to upscale, sophisticated travelers, or to the mass market, or somewhere in between.
For account executives, there is considerable travel to client destinations or utilization of client products. On the other hand, their fortunes rise and fall with those of their clients; a bad season can put them out of work.
Some advertising agencies, particularly small ones, have a disproportionate share of their business in the travel field. The advertising executive can thus feel very much "in touch" with the travel industry. "I take the 'slings and arrows' more seriously even than my clients. I make myself as informed about the industry as I can," said Stuart Herman, vice president of Herman Associates of New York, who started with a single travel account in 1967, found that he adored the product, and slowly developed a specialty in the field.
An agency like Herman Associates, which handles mainly international destinations and travel companies, may have an added role of explaining the American market to a foreign tourism director, who may be at the start of a three- or four-year stint here. The advertising agency has to identify the market, choose a theme, develop a concept, determine positioning for ads, decide strategy for running the ads-in short, and get the best bang for the buck." While this is true for advertising any product, travel is different because, according to Herman, "so much of travel is illusion."
"Every type of business has its own eccentricities," Herman said, "its good times and bad. But travel advertising has almost a total absence of long-range planning. You have to be extremely fast on your feet to respond to the changing situation-for example, the client who says his objective is to increase sales from individual travelers, and then four months later turns to groups or incentives. It is so volatile."
Unpredictable events such as earthquakes, hurricanes, air-plane crashes, political unrest, currency fluctuations, and strikes can render an ad campaign useless. "Your biggest client may be a hotel in a country that becomes a hotbed overnight. There are tinderboxes all around the world. You don't know what to expect one day to the next."
There are definite rewards, however. There is a fair amount of travel (but not all of it is subsidized). The biggest benefit, said Herman, is that "I have clients all over the world; I have friends all over the world." In Herman's case, he can also point with satisfaction at helping to put a new destination on the American tourist's map Yugoslavia.
More than simply creating pretty displays for newspapers and magazines, an ad agency plays a key marketing role. Inasmuch as tourism is a major source of foreign exchange for a country, an ad agency also plays a key role in its economic vitality.
Herman Associates, which was founded by Herman's wife, Paula, in 1963 (after she was fired from a job for being pregnant), is small, employing only 25 people. "We are not an Ogilvy and Mather. Clients here don't get a second and third team," said Stuart Herman. "We have only one team." Being small has some advantages for the staff. 'There is a sense of involvement here that you might not have at a bigger agency. At a bigger agency, there may be so many layers, there is little exposure to the client, work is far removed, frequently comes back unrecognizable, and there is no control. Here, there is far less to cut through to make your ideas known and listened to."
Also, the staff is more likely to work on several different campaigns at once rather than on just one. The art director may work with six to eight clients largely because the agency does not have the volume from a single client.
Salaries are modest at entry level but are excellent at senior levels.
Herman's advice for getting into an ad agency is: "I hire people with advertising experience, but not necessarily travel advertising experience. I look for someone who is bright, who is also widely traveled. You can be the greatest art director in the world, but if you have never been to Europe, you haven't experienced travel." The media planner also should have a "feeling" for matching up the product advertising with the correct media that will go to the right markets.
Many ad agencies like Herman Associates are also accommodating a trend of clients' wanting other service such as public relations. Today' explained Herman, "You are not just dealing with advertising, but communications. There used to be a war between public relations and advertising. But in the last decade, clients appreciate coordinated marketing effort between public relations and advertising."
The other side of advertising is space sales-that is, working for print and broadcast media in the travel category. Publications like the New York Times, Texas Monthly, Food & Wine, Gourmet, Connoisseur (the list goes on and on) all employ advertising space salespeople to specialize in the travel category.
