By Patti Murphy
Kevin Loveless began his career in the travel business at the
age of five, scooting around downtown Boise on his homemade skateboard and
delivering paper tickets to the customers of his mother’s agency, Global Travel.
“I’d open the mail, I’d sort through stuff, I’d file things away,” he said about
his tasks. “I did the first skateboard delivery in Boise Idaho. I built my own
skateboard and took tickets around. They were paper tickets and they had to be
on time and delivered every day.”
That was in the 1950s after his mother, Evelyn, had bought the one-office travel
agency in Lewiston and moved it into the downtown Owyhee Hotel. Today Loveless
has taken over the helm as president and Global Travel, with its 105 employees
and 11 locations in Idaho, Washington and California, is one of the top 50
travel agencies in the country and one of Idaho’s Private 75.
In these days of a changing economy and consumer belt-tightening, what keeps
Global Travel in business and at the top of their game?
Personalized service is what Loveless will tell you. The kind that you simply
cannot get by doing all of your travel yourself online.
Loveless points to studies showing that as the complexity of travel increases,
online travel bookings have peaked and are shrinking, while the use of
traditional travel agencies is picking up.
“Online services do a good job if everything goes as expected, but there are
limitations to the service they can provide,” he said. “What if you need to make
a change or you got a name spelled wrong? There are a lot of layers and
annoyances in the system that people aren’t used to, and we have that bank of
knowledge.”
He cited the day American Airlines grounded a large number of their airplanes
for an FAA inspection. “That’s a lot of people to get grounded all of a sudden,”
he recalled. “But, we were able to take care of every one of our customers
within 24 hours, proactively get them on planes to get them where they were
going.”
The chaos of September 11 also put his company to the service test, as frantic
phone calls came in from clients seeking information about passengers on the
downed planes. Global Travel specialists were able to pull up records and see
that no Global Travel passengers were on the downed planes. People who had
booked flights online did not have access to that same sort of immediate
service.
This doesn’t mean Global Travel hasn’t kept up with the trends. Loveless
explained that while his company does much of its business face to face or over
the phone, they also provide some online services and is moving toward using
virtual offices.
“Good travel consultancies are not easy to build, and the good news is that with
virtualization is we can basically network people together,” he said. “ Soon,
we’ll have a lot more home based staff and we can recruit people nationally who
want to stay where they are and put facilities up that are more employee based
than consumer based, which is a new way of thinking for us,” he said.
He recalled the days when airlines would use chalk-boards
hanging on a wall to keep track of their reservations.
“The business is changing all the time so we need to be nimble.”
Challenges
According to Loveless, the U.S. travel industry is challenged by the lack of
infrastructure across the country. ”Part of my concern is that we need a free
flowing way to get from point A to point B,” he said. “We don’t have trains like
in Europe as a backup for short haul situations, here to Portland, here to
Seattle, here to San Francisco.
“I’d also love to see the U.S. be friendlier to the tourist, like they used to
be, because it’s been a bit of a barrier.”
An Idaho company with a global reach
Loveless said that with the economy becoming so globalized, his business has
been able to expand its international reach as well.
“We love being in Idaho, but we don’t think of ourselves as
being restricted to its market. So, being part of the top 50 travel agents in
the U.S., we all know each other and its one big network that has grown
together.
“We really don’t compete, we cooperate. That’s really how we
have grown. “
GLOBAL TRAVEL continues on P.22
