MANSFIELD — Some things go together — like family and vacation.
Sisters Laura Baker and Terri Berger-Davis of Berger Travel Agency have been proof of that for the past 32 years. Their father, John Berger, showed his daughters the path of an agent working at AAA and the license bureau.
After high school, Berger-Davis worked for her father as an agent. When their father left the business, Berger-Davis said she was not willing to work for the travel agency any longer. Together, she and her sister started their own business, Nov. 1, 1984.
“Why would I want to work for a company that merged my father out of the company? Let’s start our own,” Vice President Baker said of her sister’s thoughts.
The 685 Logan Road location, has seen ups and downs as economical hardships have hit local familes’ wallets. One of the ways the business has managed to stay open was with corporate accounts — none more prominent than with General Motors.
“When General Motors was still in town, my sister booked small travel with the president (Daniel Berce) of the company at that time,” Baker said. “He asked us if we would want to handle the GM travel account for at least the local General Motors.
“At that point they were buying overseas: from the Orient, in Germany. At that point, they would send their guys over to learn about the presses and they would fly business or first class.”
The Berger Travel Agency made commissions from the airline ticket sales.
“That was a pretty good account to have,” Baker said. “He was pretty much responsible for launching our business.”
In the early 1990’s, the agency found it difficult to continue its rate of earnings after airline companies cut the commission of plane tickets sold. Commissions fell from 10 percent of the ticket’s cost to eight percent, then all the way down to agencies receiving at most $25 per ticket sold, before being removed completely, Baker said.
The sisters had to configure a new strategy to stay afloat. They decided to cut ties with corporate accounts and go after leisure accounts — vacations, cruises, tours.
“We still get commission from the vendors. By changing our business philosophy, that’s how we survived,” Baker said.
At one point there were eight travel agency offices in the community. After the recession hit in the 2000’s mixed with the acts of terrorism around the world, families have been reluctant to travel, Baker said. This hit the Mansfield-area agencies particularly hard, as there are two agencies in Mansfield: Berger Travel Agency and AAA.
Baker and Berger-Davis began their business at the age of 19 and 24, respectively, doing everything “by hand.” Berger-Davis said, and as technology developed it made travel agent’s jobs easier in a lot of ways.
“Over my 42 years, the changes have been revolutionary,” the president of the company said. “When I first started at 17-years-old, we picked up the phone and called the airline. We booked the reservation; we hand wrote the ticket. Typed up the invoice, and hand-delivered corporate accounts.
“That’s the way I started out. Now the fact that you can download something to your iPhone, and get on a plane holding on to your phone using one of those (QR codes), it blows you away compared to the way it started.”
Technological ease aside, Berger-Davis said the internet and common access to computers can make a travel agent’s work more challenging.
“Technology has been our friend and our foe. It’s enhanced the way we get things done, but on the other hand, people don’t understand what we do. They think, ‘I can just do it myself.’ And they can. But what we are is a client’s advocate,” Berger-Davis said.
The agency currently employs four women, each with more than 20 years of travel agency experience. Each agent is able to compare ticket prices, times and all parts of an itinerary to make the vacation as desirable as possible, Baker said.
“You can only look at one website at a time,” Baker said. “Or there are companies out there like Kayak. We are unbiased. We see all airlines at one time. We don’t care who we put you on, it’s whoever can put you on.
“When you search, it’s whoever has put the top dollar to be at the top of your search. You don’t really know if you are getting the best deal, if there is a better price or time out there. We kind of are your advocate for selling you what flight you want in terms of time and price.”
The same situations hold for a vacation, she said.
“If you want to go to Mexico, our agents are trained to ask you the right questions: Where have you stayed in the past? Do you like to stay in Super 8 (motels) and Comfort Inn’s that are more budget or do you like the Hiltons and the Hyatt’s that are more deluxe…”
“We qualify the customer where as if you are looking online, you don’t know what you’re looking for.”
There have been many changes for the sisters and their team of agents. Over the past two decades, luxurious travel has been on the back burner for many American families.
Still, the sisters say Berger Travel Agency will be there when local customers are ready to see the world again.
