Travel Agents: Tours Hold Unique Challenges

The world has no shortage of travel agents, but relatively few specialize in the business of concert tour travel. And those who work with the touring industry require skills that far exceed just getting artists and crew from point A to point B.

About a half dozen agencies handle 80% of all touring acts, estimates Nick Gold, president of Nashville-based Entertainment Travel. Among the major players in North America are Preferred Travel, Entertainment Travel, Tzell Travel, Pro Travel, Altour and Linden Travel.

With such a high level of specialization, business is good for those that can pull it off, even when the touring scene hits a bit of a slump as it has for amphitheater acts this summer.

"I'm not complaining," Gold says. "You have to have your wits about you. Every tour is different, every band's needs are different." According to Gold, that diversity keeps the job interesting.

Nancy Rosenblatt, president of Preferred Travel in Mountaintop, Pa., says her company is also very busy.

"Knock on wood, business is really, really good," she says. "We do not solicit; all of our business comes from word-of-mouth."

Aside from national and international travel agencies, several independents also work the touring industry.

"It's all about knowing the market, the venues, your bands and the specifics of touring," says Janet Crowley, an independent travel agent specializing in the concert business. "You just need to understand the logical process that the touring business dictates.

"I don't know cruises or vacations in the Bahamas, so I would turn that over to someone else," Crowley says. "I've put my knowledge and expertise into this market, and I know how a tour [should] function so everything goes well."

NOVEL KIND OF TRAVEL BIZ

Rosenblatt says a major component of a touring travel agency is flexibility.

"I deal with booking agents, tour managers, production managers and artists," she says. "The most important difference between what we do and regular travel agents is we're on call 24 hours a day. We have to be ready for anything and everything."

Another difference is knowing which hotels are "artist-friendly," according to Gold. That can entail everything from having a place to park tour buses to being located near the venue where the act is playing.

"The biggest complaint I get is when someone is put a half-hour from the gig and when they get to the gig, there's a hotel next door."

Being artist-friendly today is also more likely to mean high-speed Internet access than tolerance of TVs being thrown into swimming pools.

"You sit down with the tour manager and discuss all the needs," Rosenblatt says. "Some people want to be near malls, some need a gym, some need to be able to bring their dog."

While Crowley has certain hotels she works with regularly, she says, "There's never one hotel in a given city that I send all my bands to. You change hotels based on the needs of the bands."

Meanwhile, Rosenblatt says she and her staff deal almost exclusively with on-site hotel staff, not national sales people. "If there's a problem, I want a one-on-one situation," she says.

But finding the necessary information in a given market is not limited to hotels.

"We need to know about access to various vendors, limousines, high-end rental cars, private jets and vacation places that are not run-of- the-mill," Gold says. "That's the kind of knowledge needed for the entertainment industry."

Crowley adds, "It's all about asking the right questions. Never assume anything."

Knowledge of how a tour works is also mandatory.

"We get the itinerary from the tour manager or the booking agency, and from that we extract the information we need," Gold notes. "Jumps are very important because drive time will have an impact on whether a band will take the full complement of rooms vs. a cleanup room."

According to Gold, production crews tend to only get a room on off days, while the driver always gets one to sleep in. "It's a fairly standard crew travel pattern," he says.

Another necessity of a tour travel agency is keeping travel data out of the wrong hands, for obvious reasons. Such information tends to be guarded at a level that rivals national security standards.

"I would say that our industry is on par with lawyers and insurance companies in terms of confidentiality," Gold says. "If someone's wife calls me and says she's lost her husband, if I'm not convinced she is who she says she is, that information does not leave our office."

Creating trusting, long-term artist-agent relationships is also important. Crowley jumped into the touring agency business right out of high school and 30-plus years later she still deals with several of the same clients.

"I'm small, so I have to offer a lot of service," she says. She adds that the touring side of the business has not really changed from her perspective, but the travel side has become more difficult.

"Whether you're booking 10 rooms or 50 rooms, it's the same amount of work," she says. "I find myself working a lot harder these days."