Head Of Innovation at XL Travel
Franz von Weilligh has a friend who’s obsessed with old cars. “They don’t make them like they used to,” the friend told him recently.
“Thank goodness,” Weilligh replied. “They break down. I don’t enjoy them. Luckily, there’s progress.”
Ask most travel advisors of a certain vintage how they felt the day airline commission reduced and you’ll get something closer to grief than gratitude. Ask von Weilligh, and his answer is much the same as it is about the cars. In fact, it’s more or less his answer to everything, and by the end of this piece it’ll be clear why.
His own initiation into the industry came already half-obsolete. Von Weilligh started in 1999, a few years into the GDS era, except nobody had told the tickets that. Advisors were still writing them out by hand. “I remember the handwritten ticket still,” he says. “After your day, you had pink palms from self-writing tickets. When there was a revalidation, you had this sticker and you stuck it on, had airline plates and you scribed that through that machine.” Then the automated ticket printers arrived, which fixed exactly one problem and invented a new one: at 5pm on a Friday, without fail, the ticket numbers would be out of sequence, and half the day’s bookings had to be voided and reprinted before anyone could go home. “You had to actually void all those things and reprint all those tickets,” he says, the kind of detail that makes anyone who lived through it wince right on cue, and makes everyone else deeply relieved to have been born later.
That was the small disruption. The big one arrived not long after: the end of commissions.
“We all thought, oh shit, that’s the end of travel,” he says. “How are we going to survive this?” Which is fair enough. An entire industry had just watched its main income stream vanish overnight, roughly the commercial equivalent of finding out your salary is now a tip jar. Von Weilligh’s reaction, though, wasn’t panic. It was something closer to relief.
“I actually thought that’s wonderful. I think it’s the perfect leveller in the industry, to take commissions away.”
He was, by his own account, close to alone in that opinion at the time. History has been kinder to his read than to the doom camp’s.
If you want the receipts: Delta capped commissions at $50 a ticket in 1995… the industry’s first real paper cut. By 1997, base commission had dropped to 8%. By 2002, most of the big US carriers were at zero. In South Africa, SAA got caught rigging its own override scheme to herd advisors toward its own flights, a stunt that eventually cost it R100 million in fines. At the time, every one of these headlines read like the plot of a disaster movie. It wasn’t. It was a long, slow, mildly excruciating game of Jenga… and the industry didn’t fall down.
Von Weilligh’s theory on why so many advisors panicked anyway comes down to a fairly savage comparison:
“We need to adopt a retail mindset in travel, because the travel agent was at that stage purely just the agent for suppliers… basically a postal worker. You’ve got the order from a client, you issue a ticket, and there we go. There was no question about what’s the value I can offer.”
Get paid a percentage automatically for long enough, in other words, and you stop having to answer the one question that actually matters: why should anyone pay you at all?
Von Weilligh had a head start on the answer. “I got my stripes in the youth travel market,” he says. “We were used to net fees. You got the price and added your own markup. There was no commission on the youth ticket. So, for me it was just a natural transition. If I over-price myself, no one’s going to buy from me. But there’s actually ample opportunity to make more money than the 7% commission you rely on.” He wasn’t being brave. He’d basically been cheating off a different, harder exam the whole time.
ASATA spent this period doing the unglamorous work of representation; pushing back on schemes like SAA’s and backing the industry-wide shift toward advisors charging openly for expertise instead of quietly hoping commission would cover the bill. Not a dramatic rescue. More like someone holding the ladder steady while everyone else re-learned how to climb.
If commission was the last existential threat, von Weilligh will tell you – cheerfully – that it isn’t the last one. It’s just moved. “What AI is now doing, and we’re already testing it at XL Travel, is conversational AI,” he says. The idea: a client emails, WhatsApps, or phones in a request exactly the way they always did, except now AI intercepts it, checks the GDS and NDC channels, cross-references the travel policy, and drafts a quote back…. no manual admin in between. Ask the obvious question and he has the obvious answer ready:
“Is AI going to take away the job of the travel agent? Most certainly not. It’s going to give the agent more opportunity to do money-making tasks instead of admin tasks.”
There’s a catch, though, and von Weilligh doesn’t pretend otherwise. Talking about it, he reaches for a different kind of nostalgia: TV, not tickets. “Knight Rider and MacGyver. It was wonderful. If you look at it now, it’s actually quite shocking. But what’s changed, unfortunately, is this instant gratification. You watch MacGyver on a Friday evening and now you have to wait another week before the next episode.” Travel worked the same way once. You quoted a client, and they were genuinely fine waiting a week for the answer. Try that now. Instant gratification is: “I want my answer immediately, otherwise I’ll do something else or go to another agent.” That’s the real flip side of all this innovation… not that advisors get replaced, but that everyone, client included, now expects MacGyver on demand.
Which brings us back to the car analogy. Nobody mourns a vehicle that breaks down in the rain, no matter how good it looked in 1985. Nobody misses pink palms from handwriting tickets, either, no matter how nostalgic that stack of carbon copies looks from a safe distance. Von Weilligh would say the same about a commission cheque that only worked if nobody asked what it was paying for and, give it a few years, the same about a GDS green screen, once conversational AI quietly takes over the boring parts. Progress, again. Not romantic. Just better. The one thing progress hasn’t fixed yet is the client who wants all of it, right now, before Friday’s episode has even finished loading.