The Australian travel industry’s talent problem is a leadership problem, and the businesses that solve it will train people well enough to leave and treat them well enough to stay.

An analysis of the travel industry talent shortage in Australia, the management layer it has hollowed out, new duties on safety and mobility, and why mentoring is the cheapest fix.

By Matt Endycott, Founder and Managing Director, Hartmann Advisory

Executive summary

Almost every meaningful step I have taken in this industry was made possible by someone senior who chose to invest in me when there was nothing obvious in it for them. That is the operating model Australian travel has quietly relied on for thirty years, and the travel industry talent problem shows it under more strain than at any point in my career.

Tourism employment is at record highs, yet travel distribution employment remains around 37 per cent below its pre-pandemic level, and the scarcest role is the management layer that develops everyone else. Low turnover flatters dashboards while engagement sits at 21 per cent, and the cost will arrive when the labour market turns.

Psychological safety is now an enforceable legal duty, and the law is moving against restraints on mobility employers have not earned. Richard Branson’s bargain, taken seriously, is the only strategy that works on both sides of the decision capable people are now making, which means training them so leaving is a real option, treating them so they choose not to, and accepting that nobody owns anybody.

This analysis is written for CEOs, general managers and people, distribution and partnership leaders at travel brands and travel insurers. It draws on 25 years leading travel and insurance distribution at Allianz Partners, nib Travel and Europ Assistance, now Redion, and on TIME, where I was a mentee in 2013, later a mentor and now a 2026 Silver Sponsor through Hartmann Advisory.

In brief

• Travel distribution employment remains around 37 per cent below its pre-pandemic level while tourism 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 the management layer, and because that layer cannot be bought back, it has to be grown.
• Falling turnover reflects a hard labour market rather than good leadership, and half the workforce reports daily stress.
• Psychological safety is now an enforceable legal duty in every Australian jurisdiction, and the law is moving against restraints on mobility employers have not earned.
• Structured external mentoring is the cheapest structural investment available to travel brands and travel insurers right now.

What Branson’s line asks of travel industry leaders

From TIME mentee to Silver Sponsor

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

Years later I came back as a mentor, and this year Hartmann Advisory joined TIME as a 2026 Silver Sponsor. The people who invested in me owed me nothing, and I would rather repay that with a cheque and my own time than write another article about fixing the talent pipeline.

Branson’s bargain and the program built around it

The line Richard Branson has been publishing under his own name since at least March 2014, and which appears on Virgin’s own site in October 2017, reads “Train people well enough so they can leave, treat them well enough so they don’t want to.” Quoted so often that it has worn smooth, it is really a statement about risk. The first clause asks you to build capability that raises someone’s market value and makes them more attractive to competitors, and the second is the only thing standing between you and losing them. Most Australian businesses do neither half properly, training just enough for competence in the current role, which builds no loyalty because it builds no options, and treating people just well enough to avoid a formal complaint.

Penny Spencer founded TIME in 2009, inspired by Branson’s views on the benefits of mentoring. An Australian travel operator put structure, money and a not-for-profit board behind the idea, and the program has run ever since, expanded into New Zealand and launches in Canada this September. It shows that mentoring in the travel industry can be organised rather than left to chance.

Why the travel industry talent shortage sits in the management layer

Tourism jobs recovered, travel distribution jobs did 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, reaching 736,800 filled jobs in the December quarter of 2025, the highest on record, before easing to 726,800 in the March quarter of 2026, still up 4.2 per cent year on year.

Travel agency and information centre services is the glaring exception, still 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.

The training pipeline and the missing managers

The pipeline that would have rebuilt distribution 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 and 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.

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, and 84 per cent reported insufficient skilled people for consultancy roles. Of the member businesses recruiting travel agency managers, 100 per cent reported an undersupply of skilled candidates. A business can still hire juniors, but it cannot hire the person who develops them, because that person left in 2020 for logistics or financial services and has no reason to come back.

Travel insurance is missing the same layer

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.

The scarcest role in Australian travel is the manager who develops everyone else, and that layer has to be grown.

Is low staff turnover a sign of good leadership?

Fewer people are moving because the market is harder

Turnover is down, and many boards are reading that as a verdict on their leadership. 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.

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, with 69 per cent saying job searching has become harder and 81 per cent feeling unprepared to search at all. What looks like loyalty is people holding on to the job they have because the alternative looks worse.

Engagement is falling fastest among managers

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. 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.

The management layer is the thinnest and most stretched it has been in my career, and if it is running on empty, nothing below it improves. The bill arrives the moment the labour market turns, all at once, from the capable mid-career people who are deciding, mostly in silence, whether this industry is worth their next decade.

What people actually leave for

Money still leads, but no longer by much. Hays’ FY26/27 salary guide has salary and benefits as the top reason professionals consider leaving, at 43 per cent, with a lack of future opportunities at 36 per cent and unclear promotion pathways at 33 per cent. Research published by people2people in May 2026 found 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 strongest driver of workplace happiness, ahead of day-to-day responsibilities, senior leadership and culture. It also found 89 per cent of unhappy workers think about changing roles often or sometimes, against 40 per cent of happy ones, and only 52 per cent of Gen Z respondents were satisfied with their direct manager.

Yet 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. AHRI data shows Australian 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. Close to fourteen billion dollars a year is being spent largely without a strategic thread, while the career conversation people want happens for one employee in seven, a leadership behaviour problem that no bigger LMS licence will fix but that can be fixed at close to zero marginal cost.

Why restraint clauses cannot replace a retention strategy

How ownership thinking shows up

Retention thinking, left unexamined, curdles into ownership thinking, and it is more common in our industry than anyone admits in public. A resignation is received as a betrayal rather than as information, someone sends the aggrieved email as though development were a loan drawn against future loyalty, and restraint clauses are asked to do the job a career path should have done. In a sector this small there are also quiet, unwritten understandings about whose people are off limits.

That is not a retention strategy. It is an accounting error, treating a person as an asset on the balance sheet rather than as a party to a voluntary arrangement that has to be re-earned every year.

Non-compete reform and the direction of the law

Government 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 clear, and the law is moving to stop employers restraining mobility they have not earned.

Trajectory is the better question

The alternative to ownership is trajectory. Asking “how do I keep this person” is defensive and has a shrinking set of legal answers, whereas “is this person’s trajectory steeper here than it would be anywhere else they could realistically go?” is a question a business can run on. If the answer is yes, they stay without a clause, and if it is no, no clause would have saved you, so 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, while the person whose departure was treated as theft tells that story at every industry event for the next decade.

Nobody signs away their career when they accept a job, and the training you give them is the price of being worth working for.

Psychosocial hazards are now a legal duty for travel employers

The regulations now in force

The second half of Branson’s bargain is no longer discretionary, because treating people well now has a statutory definition and a compliance file attached to it. The regulation has moved substantially in the last eighteen months, and every Australian jurisdiction 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.

What mental health claims cost employers

Safe Work Australia’s October 2025 statistics explain why governments moved. Mental health conditions accounted for 12 per cent of serious workers compensation claims in 2023 to 2024, around 17,600 claims, and 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 and four times the cost. Within mental stress claims, harassment and bullying accounted for a third and work pressure for close to another quarter.

Positive duty, the right to disconnect and travel’s named hazards

The positive duty under section 47C of the Sex Discrimination Act has been enforceable by the Australian Human Rights Commission since December 2023, with no size threshold, so it applies to a two-person agency the same as a wholesaler. The right to disconnect has been law for two years for larger employers and one year for small business, but compliance is patchy. 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, which suggests people do not feel safe enough to use the law.

Travel runs on after-hours disruption management, peak-season pressure, distressed and sometimes aggressive customers, and small teams where one person’s workload has nowhere to go, and insurers’ claims and assistance teams share those exposures. They map directly onto the named psychosocial hazards of high job demands, low job control, exposure to violence and aggression, poor workplace relationships, and remote or isolated work, for which regulators expect work-design controls rather than an EAP poster in the kitchen.

Six leadership practices that keep travel industry talent

Everything I have seen work across Allianz Partners, nib Travel, Europ Assistance and the client work I do now comes down to six practices. Each applies as much to a travel insurer as to a travel brand.

Practice	What good looks like
Name the vision operationally	Someone three levels down can name one thing in their own role that advances the vision.
Make development a management KPI	Career planning sits in every manager’s scorecard.
Build the middle deliberately	Emerging managers carry real responsibility before they feel ready.
Run a psychosocial risk register	Hazards are controlled through work design and documented like financial risk.
Use structured external mentoring	An outside mentor offers counsel a line manager cannot.
Assume they will leave	Every resignation is handled so the relationship survives.

 

Vision, development and a deliberately built middle

Purpose is the top driver of workplace happiness, yet in most travel businesses it is a marketing line nobody in the contact centre can act on. If a consultant three levels down cannot say what the company is trying to become in the next two years and name one thing in their role that moves it, you have a slogan rather than a vision.

Career planning is rare because nobody is measured on it, so put it in the manager scorecard and ask about it in every skip level, at a cost of an hour a quarter per person. The middle layer has to be grown rather than bought, by giving people real P&L exposure, partner relationships and decision rights eighteen months before you think they are ready, with an experienced person alongside them.

Psychosocial risk and how departures are handled

Treat psychosocial risk the way you treat financial risk, by identifying the hazards, controlling them at the work design level, reviewing them and documenting it. If you would not run an unquantified financial exposure, do not run an unquantified psychosocial one.

Finally, assume they will leave and behave well anyway. Audit how your business responds to resignations, because that is where the ownership reflex shows itself, and the consultant you develop and lose to a competitor becomes the partner who takes your call in four years. 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 not be able to rely on for much longer.

In practice, what the mentoring format looks like

Internal mentoring has a ceiling, because a manager cannot be a fully honest sounding board about whether someone should stay in their current business. TIME’s format is two hours a fortnight for six months against a defined set of goals, and it works precisely because it is structured and the mentor has no stake in the outcome. That independence surfaces problems while the employer can still solve them.

A travel brand or travel insurer can put a mentee into the next TIME intake, or offer one of its senior people as a mentor, for a fraction of what one failed hire costs. It is the cheapest structural investment available to our sector right now.

Implications

For travel businesses and employers

• Grow the management layer deliberately, because it cannot be recruited back at a price most businesses can afford.
• Build psychosocial controls into rosters, after-hours cover, peak-season workloads and customer-facing roles.
• Review where restraint clauses and informal understandings are doing the work of a career path before non-compete reform takes effect.

For managers and team leaders

• Spend an hour a quarter with each person mapping where they are going.
• Give likely successors real responsibility before they feel ready, and stay alongside them while they learn.
• Treat a resignation as information and help the person leave well, because everyone watching learns from it.

For boards and executive teams

• Read turnover alongside engagement and career planning measures, so a soft labour market does not flatter the dashboard.
• Require a psychosocial hazards register run with the same discipline as the financial risk register.
• Treat sponsorship of structured mentoring as a structural investment in the sector’s management layer rather than as charity.

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?

How Hartmann Advisory helps

Hartmann Advisory works with travel brands and travel insurers on leadership architecture, capability and workforce strategy, and can connect businesses directly with the Travel Industry Mentor Experience.

Hartmann Advisory is a specialist, senior and founder-led advisory firm for travel brands and travel insurers across Australia, New Zealand and international markets. Every engagement is led by the founder from diagnosis to delivery, scoped against a measurable result and built to be delivered rather than filed.

We work across four practices.

• Commercial strategy and growth, clarifying where to play, how to win and what has to change to lift performance.
• Partnership and distribution performance, strengthening the economics, structures and governance behind partnerships.
• Market representation and expansion, leading entry and growth in new markets, including in-market representation of client brands.
• Transformation and operating model, aligning strategy, structure and accountability so that execution keeps pace with ambition.

Hartmann Advisory is led by Matt Endycott, who brings 25 years leading travel and insurance distribution as Head of Travel at Allianz Partners, Head of Distribution at nib Travel and Head of Partnerships at Europ Assistance, now Redion. Earlier roles include Virgin Australia and The Travel Corporation. His work spans airlines, retail groups, wholesalers, loyalty programs, insurers and financial institutions across Australia, New Zealand, North America, the UK and Europe.

Train them well enough that leaving is a real option, treat them well enough that they choose not to, and accept that nobody owns anybody.

Start a conversation

If your business is rebuilding its management layer or wants to put a mentee or mentor into TIME, I would welcome the conversation.

Matt Endycott

Founder and Managing Director

matt@hartmannadvisory.com.au

+61 467 412 917

hartmannadvisory.com.au

Sources and notes

• 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)

Illustrative examples in this analysis are composites drawn from patterns observed across the sector and do not describe any single business. This analysis represents the views of Hartmann Advisory and is provided for general information. It is not commercial, legal or financial advice.