This summer has been brutal for airlines, with the industry’s ongoing staffing shortages and air traffic control problems driving a massive number of flight cancellations. Roughly 15 percent of planned summer flights in the U.S. from June through August were cut from schedules while Lufthansa was forced to cancel more than 1,000 flights scheduled to depart on July 27 due to its German ground staff going on strike.

That chaos has also complicated work for travel agents. Already struggling to accommodate the surge in travelers seeking guidance in trip planning, agents are increasingly swamped with having to handle matters pertaining to flight disruptions.

“We’ve never experienced anything like this before,” said Dannielle Jasper, an agent who has worked at Cincinnati, Ohio-based agency Prestige Travel for 25 years.

“Normally, in the summer, we’re used to schedule changes and cancellations, but not like this.”

So what has a day been like for travel agents in the summer of hell? Jasper outlines a frantic day in the office.

8 to 10 a.m.

A day in the office stars calmly, as Jasper reviews queues in the company’s global distribution system for schedule changes. She could see up to 24 changes a morning, but if the changes pertain to a booking she’s made, she can handle each one in two minutes.

But chaos starts immediately when she turns on her phone.

“We have a half dozen calls first thing in the morning, every morning. ‘My flight’s been canceled, I’m stuck here’,” Jasper said. “We do a lot more servicing that booking.”

Jasper said 80 to 90 percent of the time, agents can handle flight changes in the company’s global distribution system. But she acknowledges Prestige Travel sometimes encounters glitches in the system.

“And then, we have to reach out to the airlines, which is a disaster,” Jasper said.

Why has it been a disaster? Jasper cites the staffing shortages in the airline industry. Despite having special phone numbers that could get expedited service from major airlines, she describes an all too common scenario for agents at Prestige Travel.

“Normally, we’ll get an entry level advisor on the phone, trying to call whichever airline and when they get through, they’ll let everybody in the office know, “I’ve got XYZ airline on the phone,” Jasper said.

“And we just pass it around. But it could be hours (to speak to an airline representative).”

Jasper admits that constantly speaking to airline representatives on the phone is both time consuming and exhausting.

“We’ve got at least one person, if not multiple people on the phone, trying to get a hold of airlines. And we have additional calls coming in that we have to take. So it spreads our staff thin,” he said.

10 a.m to 12:30 p.m.

Jasper continues with the morning’s agenda before shifting to other priorities, such as starting new bookings or finishing existing ones. Agents call travel vendors — such as cruise lines, and tour operators — to get the ball rolling.

But once again, it takes a long time for a representative to answer the phone — anywhere from 30 minutes to 5 hours. That representative doesn’t know how to make changes in the company’s global distribution system, so they need to put the advisor on hold to ask a supervisor.

“(We’re) often disconnected and (having) to start the process all over again,” Jasper said. That process regularly takes more than two hours.

12:30 to 1:30 p.m.

Jasper finally has time away as steps away from her computer for lunch.

1:30 to 4 p.m.

Jasper then takes calls or answers inquiries from travelers interested in using the services of an agent. She has 20 such interactions a day, and she acknowledges she doesn’t have time to help all prospective clients.

“(So) we have to vet the prospects to ensure they are serious about booking,” she said.

Jasper then has to refocus on calls from more customers whose flights have been cancelled or delayed. She does what she can in the company’s global distribution system, expressing gratitude for the two-minute transactions. But if she can’t make changes in the system, she has to go through the cumbersome process of trying to reach a vendor on the phone.

4 to 8 p.m.

Jasper steps away from the computer for a short break. A normal day would start to be winding down at this point, since Prestige Travel generally advises its agents not to work beyond 5 p.m. But the work is not slowing down since Jasper needs to complete what’s next, which typically pertains to flight cancellations.

“Unfortunately, with airline cancellations and changes, that’s not something you can normally (put off until) the next day. That’s something you have to accommodate (immediately),” she said.

Jasper is spending longer than desired at the office because she admits Prestige Travel is understaffed. “It’s very difficult to get experienced (global distribution system)-trained agents,” she said.

The lack of global distribution system-trained agents is significant because everything Prestige Travel does regarding airlines and rental is done exclusively using such systems, Jasper explains.

“If (we) have 15 employees and five are not trained on global distribution systems, (we only) have 10 people to service airline clients,” she said.

Jasper believes getting back to customers once she has the necessary information is not a problem. “(But) it’s getting the work done (and) getting the change made that takes time,” she said.

8 p.m.

Jasper is finally finishing up at work although flights continue to get canceled. But who will help her clients when she’s not in the office?

Prestige Travel uses Travel Leaders 24, an after hours answering and servicing service for travel agencies. It has access to the agency’s global distribution system and handles requests from consumers. Jasper estimates that Prestige Travel gets up to 15 calls a night after hours.

Although she’s relieved to be going home, she knows more chaos awaits the next day.

“It’s crazy,” she said about a summer day in the office.

Skift Take

We hadn’t heard much from Yotel as a hotel chain for a while. Turns out it has recharged its ambitions for world domination. We’re intrigued by its pitch that its micro-hotel design matches well for conversions of decades-old office buildings. Boldness or bravado?

Sean O’Neill

Think you know Yotel? Think again.

• Before the pandemic, the hotel chain Yotel was best-known for running a handful of airport locations that had tiny rooms of about 200 square feet or 16 square meters in size.
• After the pandemic, the UK-based hospitality management company has 36 properties signed or under contract. These projects are a mix of city hotels. A minority of properties are at airports.
• Its new brand is YotelPad, which it calls “extended-stay residences,” with rooms in a variety of sizes, including up to 600 square feet and even a two-bedroom version. The properties offer kitchenettes, laundry facilities, and co-working spaces and sometimes sit above flagship Yotels.

Yotel isn’t a clone of Japanese pod hotels.

• Japan’s capsule hotels are an extreme concept. “They’re coffins,” jokes Viriot.
• Yotel rooms (called “cabins”), especially at airports, are quite small by Western standards and they do typically feature fold out or expanding beds. But they’re not as small as pod hotels.
• In July, Yotel said it would open a hotel in Tokyo in 2024. Did that mean it stole the capsule hotel concept from the Japanese and is now selling it back to them? No, said CEO Hubert Viriot.
• “I have invited some Japanese architects to look at my rooms in Yotel and they said, ‘Where’s the Japanese influence?’” Viriot said. “Our company’s founders were inspired by Japan, but the product is adapted.”
• “In Japan, Yotel is a level up in size and amenities from the typical business hotel — which itself is bigger than a pod hotel,” Viriot said.
• The typical city Yotel keeps about a fifth of its rooms in larger sizes. The company’s “extended-stay” brand, YotelPad, is about as roomy as CitizenM. (Other overlapping rivals include EasyHotel, Pod Hotel, Generator Hostel, and Mama Shelter.)

Yotel says that, despite making little marketing noise for years, its development pipeline is vibrant.

• Yotel, founded in 2007, is owned about 30 percent by Barry Sternlicht’s Starwood Capital Group and about 70 percent by Al Bahar family’s Jassim Al-Bahar Group. Starwood Capital owns three of the hotels.
• The asset-light company expects to achieve 50 open and signed development deals in 2024 in major destinations worldwide.
• Yotel began by managing properties itself. It’s avoided leasing. It recently started franchising, having opened its first few franchises in Park City, Utah; Manchester, UK; and London (with Tristan Capital).
• “It’ll cost us way more from an operating standpoint to go global,” Viriot said. “But once we create global brand awareness the sky’s the limit because we can then spread out in each market, such as eventually 20 hotels in, say, Japan.”

The pandemic reinvigorated Yotel rather than undercut it, despite its original dependence on business travel at airports.

• To scale up, Yotel restaffed during the crisis.
• “We recruited a new commercial team and bolstered the revenue management team, the digital marketing team, the CRM [customer relationship management] team,” Viriot said.
• The company also changed its operations.
• “During Covid, we furloughed a lot of the local hotel staff and had to fulfill administrative functions on behalf of the hotels at the head office,” Viriot said. “The good thing is that we got to understand the business better and now our 60-person team has a more savvy way of running the portfolio.”
• The company proved its cost model to potential investors.
• “We also demonstrated that we could breakeven operationally at very low occupancy rates,” Viriot said. “London was breaking even at a 20 percent occupancy rate with a roughly 50 pound a night rate.”

Yotel claims to not be a budget brand.

• “We’re ‘affordable luxury’,” Viriot said, though of course he would say that.
• “You get great locations in great cities,” he said. “You get a well-designed room with essential amenities. Every Yotel has a gym with Peletons and other equipment and a restaurant with a lounge.”
• “For owners, we’re unlocking value from real estate because we’re seen as a premium product in our competitive set and can generate a higher return per square foot on the building for owners,” Viriot said. “In the second quarter, our RGI [revenue generating index] showed we were outperforming out competitors.”
• It helps the company can squeeze two paying bookings per every one of the typical sized hotel, on average. That lets the brand make claims of generating an average net operating income of 40 percent. It also lets it suggest that an investor might pay off a loan for a typical project within about five years.

Yotel claims to have overcome a key stumbling block with wooing potential owners by demonstrating the brand can both do conversions — and then get un-converted years from now.

• One hang up some potential business partners have had is that Yotel’s design has looked too niche.
• A potential owner might say, well, if in 20 years, for whatever reason, they no longer want their property to be a Yotel, how hard will it be to convert.
• Viriot said that his company’s success in converting buildings into Yotel simplicity shows that the process can also be reversed, if necessary, to un-do a Yotel in the future without extra trouble compared to other hotel concepts.
• “The real opportunity we’re discussing with most of our investment partners today is not to build hotels but to convert buildings,” Viriot said.
• “Adaptive re-use is a very interesting opportunity because you find in many cities office buildings from the Sixties and Seventies that no one wants to rent anymore,” Viriot said.

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