Growth rarely stalls because people stopped trying. It stalls because the commercial architecture stopped supporting them. More activity applied to a structural problem buys motion, not momentum.

The takeaway for leadership

• The instinctive response to slowing growth – more reporting, more campaigns, more pressure – treats a structural problem as a motivational one.
• Five points of structural drift do most of the damage: incentive drift, channel cannibalisation, portfolio opacity, governance debt and operating-model lag.
• Drift is locally rational: every team is responding sensibly to the structures around it, which is why effort cannot fix it and why leadership rarely sees it forming.
• By the time a slowdown is visible in results, the structural cause is usually already embedded – the numbers are a lagging indicator of the architecture.
• Sustainable growth returns when structure is realigned to strategy first, and activity is re-applied second. The order is the strategy.

Why this matters now

Travel and travel insurance businesses are carrying more structural complexity than the models most of them were built on. Channels have multiplied – retail, direct, embedded, aggregated, partner-led – each with its own economics and behaviour. Post-pandemic rebound demand flattered performance for several years and is now normalising, exposing structures that growth had been covering for. Margin pressure and consolidation raise the stakes of every structural inefficiency. In this environment, the difference between businesses that keep growing and those that plateau is rarely energy. It is architecture.

The activity trap

When growth slows, most businesses respond with more activity: more reporting, more sales pressure, more campaigns, more partner meetings. In travel and travel insurance the instinct is understandable – these are execution cultures, and effort is the lever leadership can pull fastest.

It is also, often, the wrong lever. Growth rarely stalls because people are not trying hard enough. It stalls because the commercial architecture is no longer supporting performance. Applied to a structural problem, additional activity produces motion without momentum – and it carries real costs of its own: team fatigue, discount creep as sellers strain for targets the structure cannot support, partner irritation at intensified demands, and a reporting burden that consumes the hours that should be spent selling.

By the time the slowdown is visible in the numbers, the structural cause is usually already embedded. Results are a lagging indicator of architecture.

Drift is rational – which is why it is invisible

Structural drift has a property that makes it dangerous: at every local point, behaviour looks sensible. The retail team defending its book against the direct channel is doing its job. The partner optimising toward last year’s commission structure is responding to the contract it was given. The channel lead reporting progress against channel targets is telling the truth. Nobody is failing; the pieces have simply stopped adding up to the strategy.

That is why drift rarely appears in performance reviews and why effort cannot correct it. The organisation is already trying hard – at objectives the architecture set some time ago.

Five points of structural drift

Across travel and travel insurance businesses, five drift points account for most stalled growth.

1. Incentive drift.  The strategy has moved – premium mix, embedded distribution, partner-led growth, digital conversion – but compensation and channel behaviour remain tied to the objectives of a previous era. How it shows up: strategy decks describe one business, commission statements describe another. First move: put the current strategy and the current incentive plans side by side and list every point where they disagree.
2. Channel cannibalisation.  Channel expansion quietly redistributes value instead of creating it. Direct channels weaken retail performance; embedded pathways erode traditional attachment; new alliances duplicate effort in core markets. How it shows up: every channel reports progress while aggregate growth stays flat. First move: measure net new value by channel – growth after subtracting what each channel took from the others.
3. Portfolio opacity.  Leadership cannot see where value is actually made and lost across partners, products and channels – so decisions default to anecdote, and the loudest channel wins resources the economics would not justify. How it shows up: resource debates are settled by advocacy rather than evidence. First move: a single value map – premium, commission and margin flows by partner and channel – built once, maintained monthly.
4. Governance debt.  Decision rights, escalation paths and partner-management disciplines built for a smaller, simpler business are still carrying a larger, more complex one. How it shows up: cross-channel trade-offs escalate to the CEO or nowhere; exceptions multiply; partners shop for answers. First move: name the owner of each cross-channel trade-off, and give one forum the authority to settle them.
5. Operating-model lag.  The organisation’s structure still reflects how the business used to make money. New propositions run through teams, systems and processes designed for the old ones. How it shows up: the newest growth priority has the fewest dedicated resources and the most borrowed ones. First move: trace the newest proposition end to end and count the handoffs into structures built for something else.

In practice

Consider a travel distribution business whose growth had flattened after several strong years. The response was textbook effort: weekly performance calls became daily, campaign frequency doubled, and a new reporting suite tracked activity in fine detail. Twelve months later growth was still flat and the front line was visibly tired.

The eventual diagnosis found nothing wrong with effort. A recently scaled direct channel was sourcing most of its volume from the retail network’s customers; partner commissions still rewarded volume the strategy no longer prioritised; and no forum owned the trade-off between the two channels, so both kept investing against each other. The reset clarified each channel’s role, rebuilt partner economics around the actual growth model, and created a single portfolio view with an owner. Activity levels were left unchanged – and growth resumed, because effort was finally flowing through a structure that could convert it.

Illustrative composite drawn from patterns observed across the sector, not a description of any single business.

Why leaders misdiagnose the stall

Attachment decline, weaker conversion and softer momentum are usually blamed on pricing, proposition or sales intensity – the visible surfaces of performance. Sometimes those factors matter. Just as often they are symptoms, and the cause sits in the surrounding architecture: unclear channel roles, weak partner economics, inconsistent governance, or an operating model outgrown by the business it carries.

The misdiagnosis is expensive twice over. The business spends on campaigns and pricing actions that cannot fix a structural constraint, and the true cause compounds for another cycle while confidence in the strategy erodes.

A useful discipline: before approving any response to a slowdown, require the diagnosis to state explicitly whether the constraint is demand, proposition, or architecture – and what evidence separates the three. Demand constraints show up in market data. Proposition constraints show up in competitive loss. Architecture constraints show up as internal contradiction – which is exactly why they are the ones nobody volunteers.

What a structural reset looks like

Sustainable growth returns when the business realigns structure to strategy – deliberately, and in sequence.

• See the value flows first.  A clear map of where premium, commission and margin actually move across channels and partners, replacing anecdote with visibility. Everything else depends on this being true and shared.
• Clarify channel roles.  What each channel is for, where it wins, and where it deliberately defers – so expansion creates value instead of redistributing it. Ambiguity between channels is not neutrality; it is a standing invitation to cannibalise.
• Realign the economics.  Partner terms and internal incentives rebuilt around the growth model the business is actually trying to run. Until the money moves, the strategy is advisory.
• Reset governance.  Decision rights, escalation and portfolio review disciplines sized for today’s complexity – fewer forums, clearer owners, visible decisions.
• Then re-apply activity.  Campaigns, cadence and sales intensity pointed at a structure that can now convert effort into growth. The order matters: activity applied before structure amplifies the drift; applied after, it compounds the fix.

What this means around the executive table

• For the CEO:  the stall is information. Treat it as a signal about architecture before treating it as a verdict on people – the reflexive leadership change often replaces the one person who had just diagnosed the real constraint.
• For the CFO:  the value map is the control instrument. Fund the visibility first; it is the cheapest item on the reset list and it de-risks every other decision.
• For the distribution leader:  channel-role clarity is the gift that makes every team’s job winnable. Ambiguity feels like flexibility; it is actually the source of most internal conflict.
• For the people and reward function:  incentive redesign is strategy work, not administration. The commission plan is the strategy the front line actually reads.

Questions for the leadership table

• If we stopped all incremental activity for a quarter, what would our structure deliver on its own?
• Do our incentives – internal and partner – pay for the growth model we say we are running?
• Which of our channels are creating value, and which are redistributing it from each other?
• Who owns the cross-channel trade-offs, and when did that forum last change a decision?
• Is our operating model designed for how we make money now, or how we made money five years ago?

In travel and travel insurance, the question is rarely whether teams are working hard enough. It is whether the architecture still deserves their effort.

Start the conversation

If growth has slowed, channel performance is under pressure, or your business needs a clearer view of where value is being lost across distribution, partnerships or commercial execution, Hartmann Advisory helps travel brands and travel insurance businesses diagnose structural constraints and reset the architecture required for sustainable growth.

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.