Travel companies find the ticket to ride: agencies survive and thrive by focusing on business clients and customer service.

• Author: Mitchell, Karen

Beware the death knell in commerce: When Internet technology emerged as an easy solution for booking travel, some believed it signaled the end of the travel agency world as we knew it.

In some ways, it did. But evolution has shown that many travel companies have prospered, reinventing themselves by focusing on superior customer service, personal contact and niche destinations.

Those traits are all highly valued by consumers, says Charles Patti, director of the Integrated Marketing Communication program at the University of Denver's Daniels College of Business.

"There's always a segment that makes decisions exclusively by price, and those people will spend hours on the Net," says Patti, the James M. Cox professor of customer experience management at DU. "It's their psychological makeup, to some extent driven by financial need."

But a whole business travel segment, huge in number and less sensitive to price, is interested in service because the commodity of time is more valuable to them, Patti says.

"They want their tickets delivered to them, and they want to know that someone will handle any necessary changes in schedules," he says. "The idea of service has strengthened with Internet presence, part of a general notion that service should have a human aspect."

One of those listening was Brenda Rivers, president and chief executive officer of Andavo Travel Inc., which has offices in Greenwood Village and Larkspur (Marin County) Calif. Andavo Travel is the 25th largest independent travel management firm in the United States and the largest in Colorado. Additionally, Andavo Travel is the third largest woman-owned business in Colorado and ranks as the 14th largest woman-owned business in the Bay area.

Rivers, who bought the 25-year-old firm in 1988 when it was a $15 million agency, says Andavo grew by 20 percent in 2006, from $80 million to $100 million in revenue.

"The number of travel agencies started shrinking in the early '90s, even before 9/11, when the airlines stopped paying commissions," she says. "That was the beginning of major re-engineering in the way travel agencies did business. Reliant on airline commissions as the largest source of revenue, we had to move to a service fee-based pricing model. Many agencies could not make the transition. However, the end result has been a stronger and more values-based industry for those who survived."

Being innovative and embracing Internet booking technology has been a major factor in Andavo's...