The workforce has recovered almost everywhere except travel distribution. The missing layer is management, and recruiting harder will not rebuild it.

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 give me a set of answers. They asked better questions than I was asking myself, challenged assumptions my employer had little reason to challenge and gave me access to experience I could not have acquired quickly on my own.

Years later, I returned to TIME as a mentor. This year, Hartmann Advisory joined the program as a 2026 Silver Sponsor. Mentee, mentor, sponsor is a neat progression when written down, but the more important point sits underneath it. Almost every meaningful step I have taken in travel has been accelerated by somebody more experienced choosing to invest in me before there was an obvious commercial return for them.

That is not sentimentality. It is how capability has historically been transferred through this industry: experienced people developing the next layer, who then develop the layer beneath them. Australian travel did not simply lose employees during COVID. It lost a substantial part of that development engine, and the workforce data now shows the consequence.

Tourism employment overall has recovered strongly. Travel distribution has not. Training pipelines weakened at the same time, and ATIA’s workforce data points to a particularly important constraint: among members recruiting travel agency managers, every respondent reported an undersupply of suitably skilled candidates.

That changes the diagnosis. The Australian travel industry’s talent problem is no longer principally a recruitment problem. It is a leadership problem because the scarcest people are increasingly the people responsible for developing everyone else.

The takeaway for leadership

Australian tourism employed 726,800 people in the March quarter of 2026, up 4.2% year on year and close to its post-pandemic highs. Travel agency and information centre services, however, employed only 16,500 people, leaving that part of the visitor economy materially smaller than it was before COVID. At the same time, ATIA found an undersupply of skilled travel consultants among 84% of surveyed businesses and an undersupply of travel agency managers among 100% of those recruiting them.

Low employee turnover should not be mistaken for proof that the problem is repairing itself. Australian workers are moving employers less frequently, but LinkedIn research found that 51% still intended to look for another role in 2026 while 69% believed job hunting had become harder. Gallup, meanwhile, puts Australian employee engagement at just 21%. A softer labour market can suppress resignations without improving the employment experience underneath them.

The strategic response is therefore not to hold people more tightly. It is to make staying more valuable. That means deliberately building management capability, giving people credible career trajectories, designing work that does not systematically exhaust them and accepting that talent mobility is part of a healthy labour market rather than evidence of disloyalty.

Richard Branson’s often-repeated formulation captures the bargain well: “Train people well enough so they can leave, treat them well enough so they don’t want to.” TIME founder Penny Spencer turned that idea into an operating model in 2009, building a structured mentoring program around the belief that senior industry experience should be transferred rather than hoarded.

Taken seriously, that bargain is considerably more demanding than it sounds. It requires an employer to increase someone’s market value knowing that doing so may make them more attractive elsewhere, then create an environment compelling enough that staying remains the better choice. The alternative is to develop people only to the level required for their current role and rely on inertia, loyalty or contractual restraint to keep them there. That may reduce short-term anxiety for an employer, but it does not rebuild an industry.

The problem is not simply that people are leaving. A large part of the capability already left.

The headline tourism workforce numbers can easily produce the wrong conclusion. Australian tourism employment fell catastrophically during the pandemic and has since recovered to 726,800 filled jobs in the March quarter of 2026, 29,500 more than a year earlier. Accommodation employment alone rose 17.3% over the year. On aggregate, the visitor economy increasingly resembles a recovery story.

Travel agency and information centre services are the exception. Employment in that category stood at 16,500 in March 2026. The problem becomes more acute when the supply of new capability is considered alongside the employment numbers. Training participation for travel-related occupations fell sharply through the years surrounding the pandemic, while Jobs and Skills Australia continues to identify travel occupations as an area of labour-market constraint. Travel consultants remain a relatively mature workforce as well, with Jobs and Skills Australia reporting a median age of 43 for the occupation.

ATIA’s skills survey makes the shape of the shortage clearer. Eighty-four per cent of respondents reported an undersupply of suitably skilled travel consultants, but the figure rose to 100% among businesses recruiting travel agency managers. The most constrained role was therefore not simply the frontline consultant. It was the person expected to recruit, coach, performance-manage and develop those consultants.

That matters because management capability has a multiplier effect. A strong consultant creates one strong consultant. A strong manager can create ten. Remove enough experienced managers from a sector and entry-level recruitment alone cannot repair the problem, because the industry’s capacity to turn junior talent into experienced talent has been reduced at the same time.

The insurance sector, which shares many of travel’s distribution and service characteristics, shows a similar structural risk. The Insurance Council of Australia’s Talent Roadmap estimates that around 30% of the insurance workforce will reach or exceed retirement age by 2030. The issue is not simply future vacancies. It is the concentration of knowledge, judgement and coaching capability that leaves with experienced people if it has not been transferred beforehand.

This is why trying to recruit the industry’s way out of the problem is insufficient. Businesses can compete for the same finite pool of experienced managers, move salaries higher and transfer the shortage from one employer to another. What the industry cannot do through recruitment alone is increase the size of that pool. That requires deliberate development of the next layer before the vacancy exists.

Low turnover is not the same thing as loyalty

This is also the wrong moment for businesses to congratulate themselves on retention.

Employee mobility across Australia has been declining, and recruitment conditions have become easier in parts of the economy. That can make a falling attrition number look like evidence of stronger culture or better leadership when part of what it reflects is simply a more cautious labour market.

LinkedIn’s Australian research illustrates the distinction. Fifty-one per cent of Australians surveyed still intended to search for another job in 2026, but 69% said finding one had become more difficult and four in five felt unprepared to look. People staying because the external market appears unattractive is materially different from people staying because the internal opportunity is compelling.

Put the engagement numbers beside that and the risk becomes clearer. Gallup reports that only 21% of Australian employees are engaged at work, down two points from the previous three-year rolling average. Low mobility and low engagement can coexist perfectly well. In fact, together they create one of the more dangerous workforce conditions for an employer: employees remain physically present while becoming progressively less invested in the organisation.

The bill does not necessarily arrive while the labour market is soft. It arrives when opportunity returns. Employees who have deferred a move rather than abandoned the idea can move quickly, and the people with the greatest external options are often precisely the experienced performers and emerging leaders the business can least afford to lose.

Leadership teams therefore need a better retention question than “how many people left?” They need to know whether the people who stayed are growing, whether their future inside the organisation is credible and whether they would still choose the organisation if the external market became materially stronger tomorrow.

The middle is where the system either repairs itself or keeps breaking

The management shortage deserves disproportionate attention because managers sit at the point where almost every other workforce intervention either succeeds or fails. Strategy is interpreted through them, culture is experienced through them, workload is allocated by them, performance is coached by them and career opportunities are either surfaced or withheld by them.

This is why the instinct to solve a talent problem primarily through graduate recruitment or entry-level hiring is incomplete. More junior people entering a weak management system simply increases the number of employees depending on an already stretched layer for development.

The better response is to build that middle deliberately and earlier. Emerging managers need genuine exposure to the work of leadership before the title arrives: commercial accountability, partner relationships, difficult performance conversations, hiring decisions, financial literacy and real decision rights. Waiting until someone is promoted before beginning to develop those capabilities is one reason organisations repeatedly discover that their succession pipeline is shallower than expected.

External mentoring matters for the same reason. An internal manager can coach someone on performance inside the organisation, but there is a natural limit to how objectively they can help that person interrogate whether the organisation itself remains the right place for their development. A mentor with no stake in the answer can ask that question more freely.

That is part of what makes TIME useful. It formalises knowledge transfer between generations of industry leadership rather than hoping it occurs informally. The program was founded in 2009 as a not-for-profit mentoring organisation and deliberately combines structured mentoring with agreed development outcomes and accountability. For an industry with a constrained management layer, that is not peripheral professional development. It is workforce infrastructure.

Retention becomes dangerous when it turns into ownership

There is another leadership failure sitting underneath the talent debate that is worth addressing plainly. Retention, taken too far, can become a form of ownership thinking.

It appears when a resignation is treated as betrayal rather than information, when an employer mentally converts past development expenditure into a debt of future loyalty, or when a restraint clause is asked to perform the work that career progression and leadership should have been doing.

None of those behaviours changes the underlying employment relationship. A person remains because the arrangement continues to work for both sides. Development does not purchase their future labour, and employment does not transfer ownership of their career.

Australian policy is moving increasingly firmly in that direction. The Federal Government announced in 2025 that it intended to restrict non-compete clauses, no-poach arrangements and wage-fixing agreements. In September 2026, it released draft legislation proposing to prohibit non-compete clauses for employees earning below the Fair Work Act high-income threshold, currently $190,100, while also addressing other unfair restraints. The legislation is not yet law, but the policy direction is difficult to misread: ordinary employee mobility is increasingly being treated as a feature of a productive labour market rather than something employers should routinely be able to contract away.

That should prompt a better leadership question. Instead of asking how to stop a person leaving, ask whether their professional trajectory is steeper inside the organisation than it would realistically be elsewhere.

That framing changes behaviour. It makes development a retention strategy rather than a retention risk. It encourages managers to talk about career movement before someone resigns. It also produces healthier exits when the organisation can no longer provide the right trajectory.

In a small industry, that matters commercially. People circulate. Former employees become clients, suppliers, partners, competitors and sometimes employees again. A business that develops people well and handles departures professionally builds a network around itself. A business that treats every exit as disloyalty builds a reputation just as effectively, but in the opposite direction.

Training people so they can leave therefore only works once an organisation accepts that it never owned them in the first place. Development is not collateral against future service. It is part of the price of remaining an employer talented people consider worth choosing.

Treating people well now includes a much harder standard of work design

The second half of the bargain has also changed materially. Treating people well can no longer be reduced to culture language, benefits, an employee assistance program or a set of leadership values. Psychosocial risk has become a formal work health and safety issue across Australia, with regulators increasingly focused on the way work itself is designed.

Victoria’s Occupational Health and Safety (Psychological Health) Regulations have been in effect since 1 December 2025, supported by a compliance code governing psychological health and psychosocial hazards. Safe Work Australia’s national data also shows why the regulatory focus has intensified: mental health conditions accounted for 17,600 serious workers’ compensation claims in 2023–24, representing 12% of serious claims and an increase of 161% over the preceding decade. Median time lost was 35.7 weeks and median compensation paid was $67,400.

For travel businesses, those risks are not theoretical. The sector routinely combines peak-period workload, after-hours disruption, distressed customers, aggressive customer behaviour, small teams, remote work and roles where an individual may carry significant responsibility with relatively little control over the events creating that workload.

The leadership error is to respond to structural work-design problems with individual resilience interventions. An EAP can be valuable, as can wellbeing training, but neither fixes chronic understaffing, unreasonable workload, low decision authority, unclear responsibilities or repeated exposure to customer aggression. Where the hazard is created by the design of the work, the serious response is to redesign the work.

That is why psychosocial risk should increasingly be managed with the same discipline as financial or operational risk. Identify the exposure, determine who is affected, put controls in place, assign ownership, review the controls and document the decisions. Treating it as a cultural aspiration rather than a managed business risk is increasingly inconsistent with both the regulatory environment and the actual cost of failure.

There is also a direct link back to retention. A business cannot credibly tell employees it is investing in their careers while leaving them in an operating model that continually exhausts them. Development without sustainable work design simply makes an exhausted employee more employable elsewhere.

What people stay for is largely within management’s control

Pay matters and always will. A business substantially below market cannot solve that problem through purpose or mentoring. But once remuneration reaches a defensible level, the factors determining whether someone sees a future in an organisation increasingly sit inside management rather than payroll.

Career trajectory, meaningful responsibility, the quality of the direct manager, visibility of future opportunity and the sense that somebody senior is invested in an employee’s development all shape whether staying feels like progress or stagnation.

This is where many organisations create unnecessary complexity. They spend heavily on learning systems, courses and formal programs while the much simpler development conversation is inconsistent. A learning platform cannot tell someone that they are ready for broader responsibility, sponsor them into a new relationship, give them a stretch assignment or explain candidly what stands between them and the next role. A manager has to do that.

The practical implication is that development should become part of management performance rather than something delegated to HR. If managers are accountable for revenue, margin, customer outcomes and compliance but not for the capability they leave behind them, businesses should not be surprised when succession remains weak.

The most useful measure is not training hours. It is whether employees are gaining capability, responsibility and options. A manager who develops people well should eventually produce employees capable of taking jobs elsewhere. That is evidence the development worked. The retention challenge is then to ensure the organisation can continue giving those people reasons to deploy that capability internally.

What good looks like in practice

For travel and travel insurance businesses, the leadership response does not require another broad employee-value-proposition exercise. It requires a handful of operating disciplines applied consistently.

The organisation first needs to make its strategy legible to the workforce. Purpose only affects behaviour when an employee can connect the direction of the company to decisions in their own role. A consultant three levels below the executive team should be able to explain what the business is trying to become over the next two or three years and how their work contributes to it. If they cannot, the organisation may have a brand line, but it does not yet have a shared operating purpose.

Development then needs to become an explicit management responsibility. Managers should know the likely next move for each strong performer, the capability gap standing between that person and the role, and the experiences required to close it. Those conversations should occur before a vacancy appears and before the employee begins asking the external market what they are worth.

The management layer itself needs deliberate investment. Emerging leaders should be given commercial exposure and decision rights earlier, but with experienced support around them. That means real P&L understanding, genuine partner relationships, responsibility for difficult decisions and enough room to make controlled mistakes. The industry cannot complain that managers are impossible to hire while protecting every meaningful management experience until after promotion.

Psychosocial risk needs to be integrated into operating governance rather than isolated inside HR or wellbeing. Workload, job control, customer aggression, after-hours expectations, role clarity and team capacity should be discussed with the same seriousness as revenue leakage, complaints or regulatory risk. The point is not simply legal compliance. A business that systematically burns through its experienced people cannot build a sustainable talent pipeline regardless of how strong its recruitment brand appears.

Structured external mentoring should also form part of the development architecture, particularly for emerging and mid-career leaders. Internal sponsorship and external mentoring do different jobs. One creates opportunity inside the organisation; the other provides perspective without an organisational interest in the answer. Used together, they are considerably more powerful than either alone.

Finally, organisations should examine how they behave when somebody leaves. Resignations reveal the real culture more clearly than engagement surveys because they test whether leaders genuinely believe people own their careers. A professional exit, continued relationship and genuine support for the person’s next move can create commercial value for years. An emotional or punitive response tells every remaining employee that development was conditional on permanent loyalty.

The questions the leadership team should be asking

The useful questions for FY27 are therefore less about recruitment activity and more about the health of the development system. Leadership teams should know how many employees have had a credible career conversation with their manager in the past six months, who the next generation of managers actually are and what commercial responsibility those people hold today. They should be able to distinguish falling attrition caused by stronger leadership from falling attrition caused by a weaker external job market, and they should know whether psychosocial hazards are governed with anything approaching the discipline applied to financial risks.

They should also examine the last few resignations and ask what those exits taught everyone who remained. If the organisation talks about empowering careers while reacting defensively when somebody exercises that agency, employees will believe the behaviour rather than the values statement.

Most importantly, every leadership team should be able to answer whether its best people are becoming more valuable because they work there. If the answer is unclear, the business does not have a retention problem yet. It has a development problem that will eventually become one.

The industry has to rebuild the development engine

There is a softer version of this argument that says investing in people is simply the right thing to do. It is, but the commercial case is stronger.

Australian tourism employment has recovered to 726,800 jobs, while travel distribution remains materially below its pre-pandemic workforce. ATIA continues to report acute shortages of consultants and, more importantly, managers. Insurance faces its own ageing workforce problem, with around 30% expected to reach or exceed retirement age by 2030. Australian employee engagement sits at 21%, even as a difficult external labour market suppresses employee movement. Mental-health-related workers’ compensation claims have risen 161% in a decade, while regulation is putting greater responsibility on employers to address psychosocial hazards through the way work is designed.

Those pressures converge on the same group: experienced and emerging managers. They carry institutional knowledge, coach the next generation, translate strategy into behaviour and decide through thousands of small interactions whether capable people can see a future inside the industry.

The sector will not rebuild that layer by moving the same managers between competitors. It has to produce more of them.

That brings the argument back to Branson’s bargain. Train people until leaving is a genuine option, because capability that has no value outside the organisation probably does not have enough value inside it either. Then build an organisation where staying continues to offer growth, meaningful work, strong leadership and sustainable conditions.

The bargain only works, however, if employers accept its final implication. People may still leave. Development cannot guarantee retention because employment is not ownership. What it can do is make staying rational for longer, make departing employees stronger ambassadors for the organisation and increase the overall capability of an industry that urgently needs it.

I benefited from that model in 2013 because people who owed me very little were willing to invest their time and experience in my development. Hartmann Advisory supports TIME now because rebuilding the industry’s leadership pipeline requires more than writing about the problem. It requires senior people and businesses to put time, structure and money back into the mechanism that develops the next generation.

For a travel or travel insurance business, putting an emerging leader into a structured mentoring program or releasing an experienced executive to mentor somebody else costs very little compared with a failed management hire or another year without credible succession. That is not charity. It is investment in the infrastructure the industry’s future leadership depends on.

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, reviewing development and retention or bringing psychosocial risk into the operating model, Hartmann Advisory works with travel and travel insurance businesses on leadership architecture, capability and workforce strategy. We can also connect businesses and emerging leaders 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 
Australian Bureau of Statistics, Quarterly Tourism Labour Statistics, March quarter 2026.
Australian Travel Industry Association, Significant Recruitment Challenges Continue for Travel, March 2024.
Jobs and Skills Australia, occupation profiles and 2025 Occupation Shortage List.
Gallup, State of the Global Workplace 2026, Australia country data.
Safe Work Australia, Key Work Health and Safety Statistics Australia 2025.
WorkSafe Victoria, Occupational Health and Safety (Psychological Health) Regulations 2025 and Psychological Health Compliance Code.
Insurance Council of Australia, Insurance Industry Talent Roadmap.
Australian Treasury and Treasury Ministers, proposed reforms to non-compete clauses and other worker restraints, 2025–26.
LinkedIn News Australia, Australian jobseeker research, January 2026.
Travel Industry Mentor Experience, program and organisational information.