Can Travel Agencies Still Make a Living?

When mention is made of IFTM, the older generation’s eyes brighten as they recall Deauville, the blessed era for a generation.

Champagne flowed freely there; the very upscale seaside resort was privatized by the industry, and even stars would come to energize memorable soirées. Since then, not that the show has lost its luster, but the industry has undergone several mutations that have strongly impacted its business model.

There was zero commission, NDC, the Internet, and the proliferation of online travel agencies. Then producers, notably tour operators, moved into BtoC distribution.

Throughout all this, travel agencies had to carve a path to continue to exist.

“From the moment I bought Centrale Voyages, in March 2024, to today, the fees charged by our agencies, i.e., the honoraria, have collapsed in the corporate sector.

We have reduced the invoicing of our fees touched by ten times over ten years. It is largely due to digital players.

These companies are in conquest mode and will seek to be profitable only in the long term. We still make a living with small businesses, with whom we have a close relationship“, explained François Lévêque, CEO of Centrale Voyages, during the conference “Travel Agencies: How to Create Value?” organized at the IFTM on September 17, 2026.

The tone on Plus Voyages is not exactly upbeat either.

The agency, which started out purely focused on leisure, has diversified into business travel to the point that this activity now accounts for 70% of its business volume.

A rapid growth that does not come without trade-offs.

“In corporate, we cannot margin. However, we can charge service fees, but the levels are so low that we cannot earn a living.

Then the suppliers’ commissions, we receive them at the end of the year, so we have to wait.

On this activity, we are reaching balance, albeit barely. The leisure side allows us to recover margin, around 10%, and the events side even more, around 25 to 30%, with higher margins“, continued Solenn Le Brazidec, the managing director of the agency.

A finding that seems to hold for mid-sized corporate agencies. The big players in the market, such as Amplitudes and others, manage to stand out thanks to their own technological solutions and volumes.

To improve this situation and generate margin, in order to keep teams in business travel, the leadership of Plus Voyages decided to launch a new brand in… leisure.

Legends of Africa offers tailor-made stays on the African continent, a way to generate added value. But the exercise is not always so straightforward.

Because, to exist, the new entity relies on online client acquisition, a process that comes with a cost and not only benefits.

“In our country, the notion of service is broadly hard to value. The availability of a service is the norm.

Traditionally, in business travel, we did not charge for our services. In leisure, I do not question our strategy of acquiring clients on the web, but we are asking a lot about quotes.

We take time to respond, share our expertise and know-how. It’s a bit as if all of this were being sold off, because we often do not receive responses from the people who contact us“, asks Solenn Le Brazidec.

One observation that also applies to the press. For two decades, Internet taught readers that information was free. It nevertheless requires journalists, graphic designers and developments.

Information has a price. For those who want to support our journalists, subscription remains the best solution.

And that is what Eric Beatens, the president of Eric&TheTrip, is fighting against. “Time is not free; it must be paid. It is up to us to calculate the cost of the time spent on such or such request, in order to know what we can do and bill for it.

When I launched Eric and the Trip, I offered a travel advisory service, but I quickly stopped that, because the travel planner activity is not profitable. Bespoke travel is much more lucrative“, he explains.

In 2023, Manor had established a pricing grid, akin to what banks or telecom operators in France implement. A bank transfer, an overdraft facility, a loan… nothing is free, and anyone who opens an account knows it.

If members did not really take hold of the subject, the initiative was interesting. It aimed to add value to what travel agencies do for their clients, be they business or leisure travelers.

“Today, everyone complains, but who offers something else? The only value proposition, in my exchanges with professionals, has been: prices must be increased. It is our responsibility to have a vision for the future and a business model“, Grégory Mavoian, then-president of the Manor network, explained.

We listed everything we do to create a catalog of pricing conditions. It isn’t fixed; it is evolving. It isn’t possible to sell at a loss; each service has a cost“.

It should be noted that, for certain services like rail, profitability is negative for corporate agencies.

On one hand, clients don’t want to pay anymore, but they request more and more technologies that require developments. On the other hand, suppliers pay commissions that increasingly resemble crumbs at the end of a meal, except for hegemonic players.

Under these conditions, it becomes very difficult to envision a bright future for this activity, which will probably end up affecting only a handful of companies, because salvation will come from volume.

“We are facing a quantity of services we cannot monetize. It occupies a large part of my time, but I have no answer to this problem, added François Lévêque.

We try to be differentiating, except that we do more or less the same thing. My job is to become more productive; I have no choice, otherwise we will disappear.

To increase our margins, we rely on remuneration of financial flows, and I go looking for pennies that linger everywhere. We are a bit at break-even. Without retrocommissions, we would have no value.

I feel that urgent situations are needed to demonstrate our value, but everything is quickly forgotten“, assessed the leader.

The two leaders confronting the financial downturn in business travel seek a remedy by developing leisure and the lucrative bespoke travel.

This lifeline must keep the entire operation afloat, thanks to the margins it yields, but also the cash flow generated by deposits.

For Éric Baetens, it’s time for the sector to assert itself and not be ashamed of making money.

“When I started, I turned to bespoke travel, because it is difficult to compare offers. The client has no reference point with other agencies. Standardized products will always be hard to margin.

After, regarding the margin to apply, at first I was at 13%, then, after the Covid period, I decided to raise it to 17%, due to costs and other factors. At the same time, Voyageurs du Monde achieves a margin of around 30%.

I didn’t tell my clients anything, these four points are almost painless for them. Except that this increase generated 30% more revenue. It allowed me to fund my accreditations, to pay the freelancer who handles these files.

The main hurdle is psychological; it is in our heads, us, the travel agents“, the travel agent confides, who also acknowledges that his case is specific because he is alone, without overhead or client acquisition costs.

By the way, according to Enterprises of the Voyage, new entrants who register do not come to compete with Booking or Airbnb, nor to impose a new technology.

They often rely on niches to develop their activity, thus benefiting from community involvement and effective word-of-mouth.

If the question of value is an eternal one, artificial intelligence comes to challenge the certainties that the web took thirty years to impose. In the corporate sector, this revolution is raising questions.

“In my view, AI is simply the continuation of SBT. At the time, we were already wondering about the impact on humans, and, let’s be honest, it is enormous. AI will have an impact on humans. With the implementation of Wondermiles, we reduced staffing needs by 35%.

In tourism, AI will help us gain productivity, because people always want to speak to a human and need someone to talk to on the phone or via video. Then trust remains paramount“, reassures Solenn Le Brazidec, the associate managing director of Plus Voyages.