Spotlight on Nolan Burris: future-proofing on the road

With Travel MarketPlace 2015 taking place June 16-17, PAX is profiling some of the notable presenters at the event. A full list of speakers and event details can be found at www.travelmarketplace.com.

For Nolan Burris, the future of the travel industry remains bright for those who think ahead.

The founder of Future Proof Travel Solutions will be bringing that message directly to agents at this year’s Travel MarketPlace, through a series of presentations outlining the steps toward ensuring a viable travel career in the coming years.

Burris started his travel career in the late 1970s in Tulsa, Oklahoma, after making the decision to “stop being a starving musician and start being a starving travel agent” following a personal epiphany.

“I had never used a travel agent before and one day, I was waiting for a bus standing in front of a travel agency when it hit me all of a sudden,” Burris recalled. “I could either get a regular job or get into travel, which looked really cool. What drew me was the idea of every day, dealing with something that makes people happy. The ironic thing is that I started out working for a corporate travel agency, but even then I realized that my job was to make things a little easier for people doing something very stressful.”

After transferring to Vancouver with Uniglobe International in the mid-1990s, Burris said that it was a combination of dwindling commissions and the growing popularity of the Internet which inspired a need to prepare the travel industry for the road ahead. In 1999, Burris began Future Proof Travel Solutions to assist agents as they entered this brave new world.

“At the time, the airlines started chopping commissions and in the middle of all that I watched a lot of people I knew very well lose their livelihood,” he said. “What struck me in a very deep way was that the industry needed to reinvent itself – not just a minor tweak and to start charging a fee here and there, but a true reinvention. The Internet had just come along and fees and commissions were going away, so it was a perfect storm.”

A first-time speaker at Travel Marketplace, Burris will be conducting several talks throughout the event. With ‘You: The Indispensible Travel Agent,’ agents will learn how to become desirable to clients in the age of online travel agencies, while ‘Because You’re Worth It’ will provide tips on becoming a “fee-worthy travel consultant” capable of commanding professional fees of up to $1,000.

Burris will also take part in a presentation with other speakers, aimed at travel suppliers.

“This talk will be about how to better connect with a travel agent audience and how to get them to better understand the product and value you bring to the table,” Burris said. “Suppliers are the ones who pay for these shows, so how do they get the most out of their investment?”

In addition, Burris will also be presenting at the related Well-Being Travel Symposium, taking place June 15-16, with a talk titled ‘Visioneering Your Future.’

“This presentation is based on my book ‘Visionistics: The Process of Success,’” Burris said. “It’s about a holistic approach to creating success in your business. There are four key cornerstones of success, namely vision, strategies, tactics and ethics and the alignment of those aspects. That’s where the name Visionistics came from.”

In the road to becoming future-proof, Burris said that the biggest challenge traditional agents face is not the competition posed by online travel agencies, but a need to revise their role and purpose in the industry.

“Many agents think they’re in the same business as suppliers and websites – they’re not,” Burris explained. “When they say ‘how do I compete with websites?,’ they don’t need to. The business they’re in is not selling travel or making reservations – that’s the result of what they do, but it’s not what their purpose is. They’re purpose – the thing that will get people to want to use them – is providing advice, guidance and support.”

As for the future of the industry, Burris said that while it may look vastly different 25 years from now, there will still be a need for travel agents.

“I see a future that will force –willingly or not – travel agents to choose a path,” he explained. “One path will be to primarily focus on product, which could mean acting as something like a dealership for suppliers and is potentially a model that could make some money. However, the people who choose that path will be giving up the primary reason that someone calls a travel agent – an unbiased representative here to protect them. The other path, the one where I think their shining future lies, is the path where agents have control. They have zero control over who holds the purse strings of commission and 100 per cent control over the service they deliver and what they charge for it.”