the argument

Commission is not compensation

It is a thank-you from a supplier, paid at their discretion, only when a booking happens. That is a different thing from being paid for your work.

Brianna “Bri” Hill

Travel advisor since 2012

Most advisors will nod at that heading and then go straight back to running a business as though it were false. I did it for years. The sentence is easy to agree with and hard to act on, because acting on it means charging someone who is used to not being charged.

So rather than argue it, let me just describe how commission actually works, and then point at the parts of the job it never touches.

What commission is, mechanically

A supplier — a cruise line, a tour operator, a resort — pays you a percentage after your client travels. Four features of that arrangement matter more than the percentage:

• Someone who is not your client pays it. Your client pays the supplier for the trip. The supplier pays you. You are not in a paid relationship with the person you spend your time on.
• It is discretionary. The supplier decides whether to offer commission, how much, on which products, and whether to keep offering it. None of that is yours to set, and none of it is promised to you next year.
• It is contingent on a booking. No booking, no payment. The work is not what triggers it.
• It arrives late. Usually after travel, which can be a year or more after the work was done.

None of that makes commission bad. It is real money and most advisors, including me, still earn plenty of it. It makes commission a sales incentive — which is what it was designed to be. The trouble starts when a sales incentive is asked to do the job of a salary.

Four things commission cannot pay for

These are not edge cases. Every one of them happens in a normal month.

1. The work that never becomes a booking

The qualifying call, the research, the comparison, the proposal — and then the client goes quiet, or their plans change, or they decide to stay home. Commission pays nothing for any of it, because commission is triggered by the booking and there was no booking. The hours were still spent. They were spent on the strength of a maybe.

2. The client who takes your work and books it themselves

You do the thinking, they book direct or through a warehouse club, and the supplier pays the commission to whoever holds the reservation. Your research is in that trip. Your name is not on it. There is no mechanism inside the commission model that sends any of that back to you, and there never will be, because the model pays for the transaction rather than the expertise.

3. Everything between the deposit and the departure

Payment reminders, itinerary changes, the supplier who moves a schedule, the client who adds a traveler, the document that needs chasing, the question at eleven at night the week before they fly. Commission does not increase because a trip took more care. Two trips booked at the same price pay the same, whether one took four hours and the other took forty.

4. Anything on a product that pays nothing

Some of what clients want simply does not pay. Certain airlines, certain direct bookings, certain independent suppliers, certain destinations. If your income model has only one input and that input is sometimes zero, you will find yourself gently steering people toward what pays — or absorbing the work for free. Neither is the advisor you meant to be.

“But I do fine on commission”

Plenty of advisors do. The question worth asking is what that number is made of.

If your income is acceptable but your calendar is full, what you have is a volume answer to a rate problem. It works until it doesn't — until you want fewer clients, or a holiday, or a week where nobody needs anything. A model that only pays when you sell more is a model that punishes you for wanting less.

And commission-only income has an ownership problem underneath it. The size of your paycheck is set by companies you do not work for and cannot negotiate with, on terms they can change without telling you. Whatever else that is, it is not compensation you control.

What changes when a fee exists

A planning fee is paid by the person you are actually working for, agreed before the work starts, and does not depend on whether they book, what they book, or who pays a commission on it. It is the only part of advisor income that is neither discretionary nor contingent.

That is the whole structural argument. Not that commission is bad, or going away, or something to replace — but that it was never built to pay for planning, and asking it to has quietly cost the profession a great deal of unpaid work.

If the mechanics of the two are still blurry, I have written the plain definitions separately. And if you want to know what it looks like in practice over more than a decade, my own numbers are published, including the years they went down.