For years, travel agents could earn 11-15% of every fare on an international ticket, 8% on any ticket between two points outside the US, and a sturdy 10% on any domestic flights. It used to be that the agencies were courted by the airlines as being major funnelers of income; surveys consistently show 70 percent of all travelers use an agency to buy their tickets. Early on, way before my time, travel agents got lots of free travel and cool stuff for their offices like glossy posters of foreign destinations. About the time I came looking for a job in 1991 the travel perks were being reduced, tied to market share sold, parceled out to management, and sometimes not making it to the agents who did the actual selling. Mostly, though, there were enough perks available to make it a big incentive to go into the industry despite the abysmal pay for beginners.

In 1992 American Airlines introduced a $50 air fare, available for one week only, as a marketing ploy. It worked beyond their wildest dreams. Still referred to as Hell Week, it blew everyone's productivity off the chart, got them a ton of publicity, and created a monster called fare wars. From that point on, the public was enticed to travel by having wildly fluctuating ticket prices dangled in front of them. Want this fare? Stay over a Saturday night, purchase at least 7 days in advance, travel on a Monday, Wednesday, or Friday, stand on your head, quack like a duck, and it's yours. Everyone thought it was weird at first. All the old rules got changed. Then, they got used to it. And then they demanded it, no matter where or when they were traveling. The public stopped buying unless they could get it for under $300. The airlines kept trying to fill their flights at the cost of the profit margin. Eventually, someone would have to pay.

Guess who? Not the public. Not the airlines. The travel agencies.

I can just imagine the resentment that produced this line of thinking. After all, the airlines were not in full control of their inventories. They'd have to overbook in order to try to fill the planes, not knowing who was really traveling until the last minute because so many passengers booked duplicate reservations trying to keep their options open before buying. Also, travel agents are really good at getting around airfare rules: back-to-back tickets; hidden destinations (ticketing round trips to destinations with cheap prices using the city the clients really want to go to as transfer points, then cancelling the ongoing destination in the computer afterwards); handwriting tickets with back-validated dates to get an expired fare. A hundred different tricks, and the airlines eventually catch on to them but by then we've have found new ways to circumvent the rules. The profit margins aren't very big in the airline industry. American Airlines makes its real money by selling and maintaining CRTs for use with their SABRE database, for instance. But having to pay a middleman any cut at all has been galling the airlines for years. They're finally doing something about it.

So my enviable experience and fiendishly clever ideas are shortly to be handicapped beyond usefulness. If that's what they want, that's what they'll get. I can go into another field, change careers once again, because I'm a person of many skills. But I'll really regret leaving. It wasn't just the perks, you know, that made me a happy person selling travel. It was the knowledge, the ability to use every piece of information about weather, politics, and news to help make decisions, the pleasure of sending people off to have a good time, negotiating the endless intricate web of fares, flights, and rules. If they want to reduce us to cruise vendors and tour package sellers then I'm outta here. I don't want a simple job. I want a challenge.