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When you thought the travel agent was ready to shuffle off the stage, KPMG popped the cork a little early. The Australian Travel Industry Association (ATIA) has come out swinging, delivering a decisive backhand to claims made in KPMG’s recent report that all but penned the profession’s eulogy.

According to KPMG, travel agents are going the way of the fax machine, with a 34.8% role reduction over the past decade, supposedly trampled by the stampede toward online booking platforms. This is a bold claim, and if you ask the seasoned operators booking the nation’s billion-dollar trips, it doesn’t hold water as much as it leaks like a tourist’s suitcase in monsoon season.

ATIA, hardly one to let statistics sour unchallenged, has put the red pen to KPMG’s narrative. Their rebuttal? That the data in question leans heavily on the 2021 Census—a snapshot taken when Australia was locked down tighter than a Duty-Free cabinet. Borders shut. Planes grounded. Agents furloughed or laid off. Hardly the moment to judge an industry’s prospects.

“We are in the golden age of travel professionals,” says Dean Long, CEO of ATIA, with the sort of firm optimism that makes you want to book a Mediterranean cruise to prove him right. “Australians, many of whom were burnt by COVID-era cancellations and chaos, are turning back to trusted travel advisors.”

ATIA CEO Dean Long

And they’re doing it in droves. In 2024 alone, ATIA members clocked in a staggering $13.5 billion in retail travel bookings, another $11.8 billion in corporate wanderings, and $5.6 billion in land operations. If that’s a profession on life support, then we’ll eat our in-flight peanuts.

Over 70% of international flights and 90% of corporate travel are still booked through agents. Why? Because no app will get you out of a hotel overbooking in Istanbul or rebook your safari when the lions are more punctual than the plane.

The KPMG report also cherry-picked from Jobs and Skills Australia (JSA) data, citing the 17,000 Australians currently working as tourism and travel advisors but conveniently overlooking JSA’s forecast of sector growth—4.3% over five years and nearly 10% by 2034. That’s not terminal decline; that’s an upward trajectory with boarding passes in hand.

Dean Long doesn’t mince words: “KPMG’s analysis ignores the reality that 2021 was a year of survival, not business as usual. Our members were handling border closures and repatriation crises, not enjoying growth metrics.”

Indeed, it’s not the relevance of travel advisors that’s under threat, but rather their availability. Skills shortages have become the unexpected side-effect of the profession’s post-COVID renaissance. And therein lies the real headline: demand has outrun supply.

That truth speaks to something more profound—a quiet shift back to the value of human expertise in a world that got too used to clicking without thinking. Australians, pragmatic as ever, now recognise that a $100 flight saved online isn’t worth the price of sleeping on an airport bench in Kuala Lumpur.

There’s a word for that. Trust. And it’s what travel agents have in spades.

KPMG, of course, doesn’t dispute the numbers—just their meaning. But ATIA’s take is clear: the travel agent isn’t a relic; it’s a renaissance. This isn’t a profession fading into the mist—it’s a phoenix, feathers preened, boarding pass stamped, and passport ready.

And so, with all due respect to the number-crunchers in ivory towers, those on the ground—fighting for refunds, rerouting the stranded, and tailoring dream itineraries—tell a far more compelling story. One where people matter. Where experience counts, and where, in the words of one particularly travel-weary Aussie: “Thank God I booked with a human.”