Why the Australian travel industry’s talent problem is a leadership problem, and what the numbers say about fixing it

 

The takeaway for leadership

• Australian travel distribution employment remains around 37 per cent below its pre-pandemic level while tourism overall sits at record highs – and the consultant training pipeline collapsed by as much as 77 per cent in the eight years to 2023.
• The scarcest role is not entry-level. It is the management layer – the people who develop everyone else. Among ATIA members recruiting travel agency managers, 100 per cent reported an undersupply. That layer cannot be bought back; it has to be grown.
• Today’s low turnover is a market condition, not a leadership verdict: engagement sits at 21 per cent, half the workforce reports daily stress, and the bill arrives the moment the labour market turns.
• Psychological safety is now an enforceable legal duty in every Australian jurisdiction, with work-design controls the expected standard – and the law is moving against restraints on mobility employers have not earned.
• The only strategy that works on both sides of the decision is Branson’s bargain, taken seriously: train people so leaving is a real option, treat them so they choose not to – and accept that nobody owns anybody.

 

In 2013 I sat down with a mentor through a program called TIME, the Travel Industry Mentor Experience. I was mid career, ambitious, and reasonably certain I knew what I was doing. Twenty four hours of structured conversation over six months quietly proved otherwise. My mentor did not hand me answers. They asked better questions than I was asking myself, and they were willing to tell me things my employer had no incentive to tell me.

Years later I came back as a mentor. This year Hartmann Advisory joined TIME as a 2026 Silver Sponsor. Mentee, mentor, sponsor. I am aware that arc reads neatly on paper. What sits underneath it is less tidy, and more useful: almost every meaningful step I have taken in this industry was made possible by someone senior who chose to invest in me at a point when there was nothing obvious in it for them.

That is not sentiment. It is the operating model our sector has quietly relied on for thirty years, and right now it is under more strain than at any point in my career.

The line, and the woman who built a program around it

Richard Branson has been publishing a line under his own name since at least March 2014, and it appears on Virgin’s own site in October 2017: “Train people well enough so they can leave, treat them well enough so they don’t want to.”

It gets quoted so often it has worn smooth. Most people who repeat it treat it as a nice sentiment about being generous. It is not. It is a statement about risk, and it contains a genuinely uncomfortable bargain. The first clause requires you to build capability that increases someone’s market value, knowing it makes them more attractive to your competitors. The second clause is the only thing standing between you and losing them. Most Australian businesses do neither half properly. They train just enough to make people competent in their current role, which builds no loyalty because it builds no options, and they treat people just well enough to avoid a formal complaint.

Worth noting for anyone in Australian travel: Penny Spencer founded TIME in 2009, inspired by Branson’s views on the benefits of mentoring. An Australian travel operator took a leadership idea, put structure and money and a not for profit board behind it, and turned it into something that has run since 2009, expanded into New Zealand, and launches in Canada this September. That is worth sitting with, because it says something about where good ideas actually come from in our industry, and who does the work of making them real.

The problem is not that people are leaving. It is that they already left

The headline workforce numbers for Australian tourism look like a recovery story. Look one level down and they are not.

Tourism Research Australia recorded tourism filled jobs falling from a peak of 757,500 in the December quarter of 2019 to 363,900 by the middle of 2020 – close to 400,000 positions lost in six months. Employment has since more than recovered in aggregate: 736,800 filled jobs in the December quarter of 2025, the highest on record, easing to 726,800 in the March quarter of 2026 but still up 4.2 per cent year on year.

Travel agency and information centre services is the glaring exception. It remains around 9,600 jobs, or 37 per cent, below its pre-pandemic level. ATIA has described the travel sector’s COVID experience as the loss of more than a third of its skilled workforce. So tourism as a whole has been rebuilt, and the distribution end of it has not.

Worse, the pipeline that would have rebuilt it collapsed at the same time. Between 2015 and 2023, tourism qualification enrolments in Australia fell 43 per cent and completions fell 54 per cent. Travel consultant course enrolments fell 77 per cent. Tour guide training commencements fell 68 per cent. Travel consultants remain on Jobs and Skills Australia’s 2025 national shortage list, in shortage across every state and territory.

Then there is the figure that should have stopped the industry in its tracks. When ATIA last surveyed its members on skills, covering the 2023 year, only around a third of businesses reported filling a high proportion of their travel consultant vacancies. Eighty four per cent reported insufficient skilled people for consultancy roles. And of the member businesses actually recruiting travel agency managers, 100 per cent reported an undersupply of skilled candidates.

Read that last one again, because it is the whole argument. The role in shortest supply was not the entry level role. It was the management role. That is what a broken pipeline looks like from the inside. You can hire juniors. You cannot hire the person who develops them, because that person is the one who left in 2020 and went into logistics or financial services and has no reason to come back.

The same shape shows up on the insurance side of my world. The Insurance Council of Australia’s 2024 Talent Roadmap estimates 30 per cent of the current insurance workforce will reach or exceed retirement age by 2030. NIBA’s June 2026 broker research found just 11 per cent of brokers are aged 18 to 29, against a median age of 44, and named the shallow early career pipeline as a structural risk. Gallagher Bassett’s 2026 research found talent attraction and retention had climbed from the seventh biggest challenge facing Australian insurers to the third in a single year.

Two adjacent industries. Same missing layer. Same cause.

Retention right now is a market condition, not an achievement

Here is where a lot of Australian boards are currently fooling themselves.

Turnover is down. The ABS reported just over one million Australians, 7.2 per cent of the employed, changed employer in the year to February 2026, down from 7.7 per cent the year before and continuing a decline that has run since the 1970s. AHRI’s June quarter 2026 data put annual employee turnover at 13.5 per cent, the lowest since it began tracking in 2023.

If you run a business and your attrition is falling, it is very tempting to read that as a verdict on your leadership. It almost certainly is not. LinkedIn’s Australian research in January 2026 found 51 per cent of Australians still plan to look for new work this year, down from 59 per cent, but with 69 per cent saying job searching has become harder and 81 per cent feeling unprepared to search at all. That is not loyalty. That is people hugging the job they have because the alternative looks worse.

Now put the engagement data next to it. Gallup’s April 2026 report put Australian employee engagement at 21 per cent, down two points on the prior three year average, with 50 per cent of Australian workers reporting daily stress against a global average of 40 per cent. Globally, manager engagement fell to 22 per cent, down nine points since 2022, with the steepest fall in the most recent year.

So: fewer people leaving, fewer people engaged, and the managers who are supposed to fix that are themselves the fastest deteriorating group in the workforce. Gallup’s long standing estimate is that managers account for at least 70 per cent of the variance in employee engagement scores across business units. If that layer is running on empty, nothing below it improves.

The bill for this does not arrive while the labour market is soft. It arrives the moment it turns, and it arrives all at once, from the people you were counting on most.

Nobody owns anybody

There is a failure mode that sits just underneath all of this, and it is worth naming plainly, because it is more common in our industry than anyone will admit in public. Retention thinking, left unexamined, curdles into ownership thinking.

You can recognise it immediately once you know the symptoms. A resignation is received as a betrayal rather than as information. Somebody sends the aggrieved email about everything the business did for that person, as though development were a loan drawn against future loyalty. Restraint clauses get asked to do the job a career path should have been doing. And in a sector as small and as interconnected as Australian travel, there are quiet understandings between businesses about whose people are off limits – arrangements nobody writes down and everybody knows about.

That is not a retention strategy. It is an accounting error. It treats a person as an asset sitting on your balance sheet rather than as a party to a voluntary arrangement that has to be re-earned every year. Nobody signs away their career when they accept a job.

Parliament has reached the same conclusion. In the March 2025 Budget the Federal Government announced it will ban non-compete clauses for workers earning below the Fair Work high income threshold, currently $183,100, with effect from 2027, citing Productivity Commission modelling of around $5 billion a year in GDP and wage uplift of up to 4 per cent for affected workers. Treasury has been consulting on going further, to no-poach and wage fixing arrangements between businesses. The legislation has not passed at the time of writing, but the direction of travel is not ambiguous. The law is moving to stop employers restraining mobility they have not earned.

The alternative to ownership is trajectory, and it is a much better question to run a business on. Not “how do I keep this person”, which is a defensive question with a shrinking set of legal answers. Instead: “is this person’s trajectory steeper here than it would be anywhere else they could realistically go?” If the answer is yes, they stay, and you did not need a clause. If the answer is no, no clause was ever going to save you, and the honest move is to help them go well and stay in touch.

In an industry this small, the person who leaves well becomes a supplier, a partner, a client or a returning hire. The person who leaves badly, because their departure was treated as theft, tells that story at every industry event for the next decade. One of those is a network. The other is a reputation you cannot buy your way out of.

Train them so they can leave only makes sense once you have accepted that you never owned them in the first place. The training is not collateral. It is the price of being worth working for.

Safety stopped being a values statement and became a legal duty

The second half of Branson’s bargain – treat them well enough – is no longer discretionary in Australia. It is regulated, and the regulation has moved substantially in the last eighteen months.

Every Australian jurisdiction now has work health and safety regulation in force covering psychosocial hazards. Western Australia has had duties under regulations 55A to 55D since December 2022. Victoria’s Occupational Health and Safety (Psychological Health) Regulations commenced on 1 December 2025 with no transitional period, and in Victoria information and training cannot be relied on as the predominant control where the work itself can reasonably be redesigned. From 1 July 2026, new section 26A of the New South Wales WHS Act requires duty holders either to comply with an approved code of practice or to manage the risk to a standard equivalent to or higher than the code, which moves the psychosocial code from guidance to an enforceable benchmark. SafeWork NSW deployed twenty dedicated mental health safety inspectors in March 2026 and recorded 1,476 psychosocial requests for service in the six months to December 2025.

The claims data explains why governments moved. Safe Work Australia’s October 2025 statistics show mental health conditions accounted for 12 per cent of serious workers compensation claims in 2023 to 2024, around 17,600 claims, and that these claims have risen 161 per cent over the decade, the largest increase of any category. On the most recent fully developed data, the median time lost on a mental health claim was 35.7 working weeks against 7.4 weeks across all serious claims, and median compensation paid was $67,400 against $16,300. Roughly five times the time away, four times the cost. Within mental stress claims, harassment and bullying accounted for a third and work pressure for close to another quarter.

Alongside that sits the positive duty under section 47C of the Sex Discrimination Act, enforceable by the Australian Human Rights Commission since December 2023, with no size threshold. It applies to a two person agency the same as it applies to a wholesaler. And the right to disconnect has now been law for two years for larger employers and one year for small business. Compliance is patchy in practice: the Fair Work Commission received only seven disputes in 2024 to 2025, while ADP research published in June 2026 found 38 per cent of Australians are contacted about work outside hours at least weekly and 21 per cent say they cannot disconnect at all.

The gap between seven formal disputes and 38 per cent of the workforce being contacted after hours is not evidence the law is working. It is evidence that people do not feel safe enough to use it – which is precisely the thing the psychosocial regulations are pointed at.

For a travel business, this is not abstract. Our sector runs on after hours disruption management, on peak season pressure, on exposure to distressed and sometimes aggressive customers, and on small teams where one person’s workload has nowhere to go. Those map directly onto named psychosocial hazards: high job demands, low job control, exposure to violence and aggression, poor workplace relationships, and remote or isolated work. The controls regulators now expect are work design controls, not an EAP poster in the kitchen.

What people actually leave for, and what actually holds them

Money still leads, but it no longer leads by much, and the reasons clustered behind it are all things a manager controls.

Hays’ FY26/27 salary guide has salary and benefits as the top reason professionals consider leaving, at 43 per cent. Close behind sit a lack of future opportunities at 36 per cent and unclear promotion pathways at 33 per cent. Research published by people2people in May 2026 goes further: 37 per cent of jobseekers rank limited career opportunities as the top reason people quit, against just 15 per cent citing salary. SEEK’s Workplace Happiness Index found purpose at work was the single strongest driver of workplace happiness, ahead of day to day responsibilities, senior leadership and culture, and that 89 per cent of unhappy workers think about changing roles often or sometimes, against 40 per cent of happy ones. Only 52 per cent of Gen Z respondents were satisfied with their direct manager.

Now the uncomfortable counterpart. LinkedIn’s most recent global Workplace Learning Report found just 15 per cent of employees said their manager had helped them build a career plan in the previous six months, down five points on the year before. In Australia, AHRI data shows employers spent an average of $1,122 per employee on training in 2025, around $13.8 billion nationally, with 60 per cent planning to increase it – yet only 20 per cent of workplaces report integrating their training plans with their strategic workforce plans to a large extent.

So we are spending close to fourteen billion dollars a year, mostly without a strategic thread running through it, while the single intervention people say they want – a manager who sits down and maps out where they are going – is happening for one employee in seven and falling.

That is not a budget problem. You cannot buy your way out of it with a bigger LMS licence. It is a leadership behaviour problem, and it is fixable at close to zero marginal cost.

What good actually looks like

If I strip out everything I have seen work across Allianz Partners, nib Travel, Europ Assistance and the client work I do now, it comes down to six things.

1. Name the vision in operational terms.  Purpose is the top driver of workplace happiness in Australia, but purpose in most travel businesses is expressed as a marketing line nobody in the contact centre can act on. The test is simple: can a consultant three levels down tell you what the company is trying to become in the next two years, and name one thing in their own role that moves it? If not, you do not have a vision. You have a slogan.
2. Make development a management KPI, not an HR program.  If only 15 per cent of employees have had a manager help them build a career plan in the past six months, the problem is that nobody is measured on doing it. Put it in the manager scorecard. Ask about it in every skip level. It costs an hour a quarter per person.
3. Build the middle deliberately, because you cannot buy it.  Every ATIA member business recruiting for a travel agency manager reported an undersupply of skilled candidates. That layer will not be recruited into existence at a price you can afford. It has to be grown, which means giving people real P&L exposure, real partner relationships and real decision rights eighteen months before you think they are ready, with an experienced person alongside them.
4. Treat psychosocial risk the way you treat financial risk.  Identify the hazards, control them at the work design level, review them, document it. High job demands, low job control, poor workplace relationships, exposure to aggression and isolated work are all named hazards. If you would not run an unquantified financial exposure, do not run an unquantified psychosocial one – particularly now that codes are an enforceable benchmark in New South Wales and information and training alone will not satisfy a Victorian inspector.
5. Use structured external mentoring, because internal only has a ceiling.  A manager cannot be a fully honest sounding board about whether someone should stay in their current business. An external mentor can. That is not a threat to retention; it is the mechanism that surfaces the problem while you can still solve it. TIME’s format – two hours a fortnight for six months against a defined set of goals – works precisely because it is structured and because the mentor has no stake in the outcome.
6. Assume they will leave, and behave well anyway.  Audit how your business actually responds when someone resigns, because that is where the ownership reflex shows itself. The industry is small. People come back. The consultant you develop and lose to a competitor becomes the partner who takes your call in four years. On a long enough horizon, a reputation for growing people is the cheapest business development budget available to any travel business in Australia – worth considerably more than a restraint clause you may well not be able to rely on for much longer.

Questions for the leadership table

• How many of our people have had a manager sit down and map their career trajectory in the past six months – and do we measure it?
• Who is our next layer of agency and team managers, and what real P&L exposure, partner relationships and decision rights do they hold today?
• Is our falling attrition a verdict on our leadership, or on the labour market – and how would we know the difference before it turns?
• Do we have a psychosocial hazards register run with the same discipline as our financial risk register?
• When someone resigned last, what did our response teach everyone who watched?

Back to the beginning

There is a version of this article that argues investing in people is the right thing to do. It is, but that argument has never persuaded anyone who was not already persuaded.

Here is the harder version. Australian travel distribution is still 37 per cent below its pre-pandemic employment level while tourism overall has hit a record high, and the consultant training pipeline that would rebuild it fell 77 per cent over the eight years to 2023. Engagement is at 21 per cent. The management layer is the thinnest it has been in my career and the most stretched. Regulators have made psychological safety an enforceable duty with real penalties attached. And the low turnover currently flattering everyone’s dashboards is a function of a hard job market, not of anything we did well.

Every one of those pressures lands on the same layer of the organisation: the capable, mid career people who are deciding, right now and mostly in silence, whether this industry is worth their next decade.

Branson’s bargain is the only strategy I know that works on both sides of that decision. Train them well enough that leaving is genuinely an option, because that is the only kind of capability that is worth anything to you either. Treat them well enough that they choose not to, and understand that treating them well now has a statutory definition and a compliance file attached to it.

What the bargain will not tolerate is the idea that any of these people belong to us. They do not, they never did, and shortly the law will be considerably less patient with employers who behave as though they do.

I got the benefit of that bargain in 2013, from people who owed me nothing. Hartmann Advisory sponsors TIME because I would rather pay it forward with a cheque and my own time than write another article about how the industry should fix its talent pipeline.

If you run a travel or travel insurance business in this country, you can put a mentee into the next TIME intake, or offer up one of your senior people as a mentor, for a fraction of what one failed hire costs you. That is not charity. It is the cheapest structural investment available to our sector right now.

Matt Endycott is the Founder and Managing Director of Hartmann Advisory, a specialist advisory firm serving travel brands and travel insurers across ANZ and international markets. Hartmann Advisory is a 2026 Silver Sponsor of the Travel Industry Mentor Experience.

Start the conversation

If your business is rebuilding its management layer, rethinking development and retention, or bringing psychosocial risk up to the standard the law now expects, Hartmann Advisory works with travel brands and travel insurance businesses on leadership architecture, capability and workforce strategy – and can connect you directly with the Travel Industry Mentor Experience.

hello@hartmannadvisory.com.au

Hartmann Advisory is a commercial advisory firm specialising in travel and travel insurance: distribution strategy, partnerships, proposition and market execution. Based in Sydney and Perth, working with partners across Australia, New Zealand, the USA, Canada, Europe and the UK.

 

Sources 
Gallup, State of the Global Workplace 2026 (April 2026), global and Australia country-level data; Gallup, Why Great Managers Are So Rare (70 per cent variance estimate)
Safe Work Australia, Key Work Health and Safety Statistics Australia 2025 (October 2025)
Tourism Research Australia, Quarterly Tourism Labour Force Statistics (December 2025); Tourism Workforce Report (October 2023); ABS Quarterly Tourism Labour Statistics, March 2026 (released June 2026)
Australian Bureau of Statistics, Job mobility, year to February 2026 (released July 2026)
Service and Creative Skills Australia (SaCSA), Tourism, Travel and Hospitality Workforce Plan Update 2025; Jobs and Skills Australia, 2025 Occupation Shortage List
ATIA Skills and Workforce Survey (fielded early 2024, reported March 2024)
AHRI, Quarterly Australian Work Outlook, March and June quarters 2026
Hays Salary Guide FY26/27; people2people Recruitment workforce research (May 2026); SEEK Workplace Happiness Index 2025
LinkedIn Workplace Learning Report 2025 (global); LinkedIn Australian jobseeker research (January 2026)
Insurance Council of Australia, Insurance Industry Talent Roadmap (September 2024); NIBA, Data to Direction (June 2026); Gallagher Bassett, The Carrier Perspective: 2026 Claims Insights
Australian Government, 2025-26 Budget announcement on non-compete clauses (March 2025); Treasury consultation on non-solicitation, no-poach and wage-fixing arrangements
Fair Work Ombudsman and Fair Work Commission, right to disconnect; ADP research on after-hours contact (June 2026)
Australian Human Rights Commission, Positive Duty Compliance and Enforcement Policy; SafeWork NSW, WorkSafe Victoria and WorkSafe WA psychosocial regulations and codes of practice
Richard Branson, How to lead the next generation, virgin.com (October 2017); Travel Industry Mentor Experience, travelindustrymentor.com.au; KarryOn, TIME welcomes Hartmann Advisory as 2026 Silver Sponsor (June 2026)