By Tessa Robertson, Senior Leisure Travel Recruitment Consultant at Ambitions Travel Recruitment, placing leisure travel professionals across the UK, South Africa, and North America.
Employee retention in leisure travel recruitment is about creating conditions that make specialist professionals, tailor-made travel consultants, destination specialists, ski experts, safari consultants, and UHNW concierge advisors, etc., choose to stay. In Ambitions Travel Recruitment’s April 2026 poll of leisure travel professionals, 34% said feeling undervalued was the real reason they left their last role, making it the single most cited driver of resignation across the sector, ahead of management issues, lack of progression, and salary.
That figure matters. Not because it is surprising, anyone working in leisure travel recruitment hears it constantly, but because it is still not reflected in how most tour operators, tailor-made travel businesses, and expedition cruise companies approach retention. Employers tend to focus on the things they can measure: salary benchmarks, holiday entitlement, and headcount. The reasons people actually leave are harder to quantify, which may be why they are so consistently underestimated.
Tessa Robertson and the leisure travel recruitment team at Ambitions Travel Recruitment hear the real version long before the diplomatic one is ever delivered. Whether a candidate accepts one of Ambitions Travel Recruitment’s headhunting messages or registers directly, what comes through in that first conversation is always the thing that made them open to hearing about an opportunity, and it is rarely the answer they will later give their employer.
In Ambitions Travel Recruitment’s April 2026 poll, feeling undervalued came first. Salary came in joint last. That gap between what employers think matters and what candidates actually experience is where resignations are born.
What Was the Real Reason You Left Your Last Job?
Ambitions Travel Recruitment put this question directly to our network of leisure travel professionals, tailor-made specialists, cruise consultants, travel sales managers, and destination specialists across the UK, South Africa, and North America. The results were unambiguous:
Source: Ambitions Travel Recruitment LinkedIn poll of leisure travel professionals, April 2026.
These results hold up against broader research. Gallup’s 2024 State of the Global Workplace report found that 51% of currently employed workers are watching for or actively seeking a new job, and that managers account for at least 70% of the variance in team engagement scores. The CIPD’s 2025 Good Work Index found that only 55% of UK workers feel their employer genuinely cares about their wellbeing. In a sector as relationship-driven as leisure travel, where a tailor-made travel consultant’s product knowledge and client relationships are built over years, these numbers have consequences that no recruitment budget can easily repair.
The resignation conversation tells a different story from Ambitions Travel Recruitment’s poll data. Salary comes up first. It is a clean, uncontroversial answer that explains the decision without burning any bridges. But salary is rarely the real driver, it is often the reason that finally gave someone permission to go, not the reason they started looking six months earlier.
Market Insight: The candidates we speak with most often did not resign because of one bad day. They resigned because of a pattern, months of feeling invisible, of progression conversations that went nowhere, and of management styles that communicated distrust. By the time the decision was made, a pay rise would not have changed it.
Why Do Leisure Travel Professionals Really Leave Their Jobs?
The four answers in Ambitions Travel Recruitment’s poll represent the four most common journeys from engagement to resignation. They are not mutually exclusive; a destination specialist who cites feeling undervalued may also feel that management is the problem, and that lack of progression is what finally confirmed the decision. But each tells a distinct story worth examining.
Feeling Undervalued: The Quiet Departure
Thirty-four per cent of respondents named this as the primary driver. In Ambitions Travel Recruitment’s experience, it is the one that tour operators and tailor-made travel businesses are least equipped to identify before it becomes a resignation. Feeling undervalued is not a dramatic event. It accumulates across months: a well-executed itinerary that generates no acknowledgement; a promotion conversation that a senior travel consultant has been promised for three review cycles; a sales target delivered with no recognition from the leadership team.
Research from Workhuman’s 2025 Human Workplace Index found that employees who feel unrecognised are 74% more likely to be considering leaving their current role. In leisure travel, where a specialist’s product knowledge, supplier relationships, and client trust take years to build, the departure of someone who feels unseen is almost always felt before the resignation letter arrives.
The connection to Ambitions Travel Recruitment’s Benefits pillar is direct. In our April 2026 poll, 80% of leisure travel professionals said flexibility was the primary factor at offer stage. But flexibility without recognition is not a retention strategy; candidates can accept a role with strong benefits and still leave within 18 months if their contribution is not genuinely seen.
Management: The Factor That Travels With You
Twenty-five per cent cited management as the real reason they left. The observation that people leave managers, not companies, has become a cliché precisely because it is consistently true. The SHRM Foundation’s 2024 research found that poor management practices cost US employers over $223 billion over five years due to voluntary turnover. In the boutique and independent end of leisure travel, tailor-made tour operators, small expedition companies, and specialist adventure travel businesses, the impact is felt more acutely because flat hierarchies make the quality of leadership impossible to avoid.
The employers Ambitions Travel Recruitment works with who consistently attract and retain exceptional travel professionals share a common characteristic: their leaders communicate clearly, give credit visibly, and create the conditions for growth. These are not expensive to deliver. They require intention and consistency.
No Progression: The Slow Burn
Twenty per cent cited no progression as their primary driver. In our experience, this understates how often it is a contributing factor. Career development came in at 14% in Ambitions Travel Recruitment’s April 2026 benefits poll as the second most influential factor at offer stage. The symmetry is not coincidental: what brings a travel sales manager or destination specialist to a role is often what keeps them from leaving it.
LinkedIn’s 2024 Workplace Learning Report found that 94% of employees say they would stay at a company longer if it invested in their learning and development. In leisure travel, that investment does not need to be large, a development conversation that is taken seriously, a product training trip that was promised and delivered, or a route to a senior travel consultant or team leader role that is clearly articulated. Ambitions Travel Recruitment’s ebook ‘They Didn’t Leave for the Money: A Travel Employer’s Guide to Retention’ is available to download from our website. It covers what a meaningful development offering looks like in practice and why it is central to keeping your best people.
Ambitions Travel Recruitment – Original Data: What the poll does not capture is how long the journey from disengagement to departure actually takes. In Ambitions Travel Recruitment’s experience across leisure travel placements, the gap between the moment a specialist first becomes open to a move and the moment they act on it is consistently longer than employers assume, often twelve months or more. Travel professionals are, by instinct, loyal. Most have built supplier relationships, client trust, and deep product knowledge in a single business over years. They do not leave lightly. What triggers the move is almost never a single event. It is a final one, a straw that breaks something that has been bending for a long time. A promotion conversation that goes nowhere again. A restructure that is communicated badly. A new manager who changes the dynamic. And at that point, what often happens is not a job search. It is a recall: a message from Ambitions Travel Recruitment sent months earlier, when the professional was not ready, suddenly becomes relevant. They come back to us and say simply: I am ready now. When that happens, the search can move very quickly. The right opportunity for a specialist with rare skills, a tailor-made travel consultant, a long-haul product manager, a ski specialist with deep operator relationships, may already be known to us. Placement conversations that begin from a position of genuine fit, on both sides, do not linger. The candidate is motivated, the employer is serious, and the skills are valued precisely because they are rare. Counter offers, in these cases, very rarely change the outcome. By the time a specialist has reconnected with Ambitions Travel Recruitment after months of quiet consideration, they are not reconsidering the salary. They are reconsidering the whole picture, and what they are looking for is a business whose attraction model and retention model are the same thing.
Salary: The Permission Slip
Salary came joint last at 20%, which is not the same as saying it does not matter. It almost always matters. But leisure travel professionals who leave purely for more money are fewer than employers assume. More often, salary becomes the justification for a decision that was driven by one of the three factors above: the destination specialist whose progression conversation was deferred once too often; the tailor-made travel consultant whose contribution went unacknowledged; the travel sales manager whose manager communicated distrust rather than support.
When a competing offer arrives with a meaningful salary uplift, it does not create the desire to leave; it removes the last obstacle to acting on a desire that was already there. A counteroffer addresses the symptom. Research from recruitment consultancy Robert Half consistently finds that the majority of professionals who accept a counteroffer leave their employer within six months, regardless. The underlying conditions that prompted the search are still there.
Ambitions Travel Recruitment’s View: The most important thing an employer can do about retention is to stop treating it as a separate programme. Retention is not a quarterly initiative. It is the daily consequence of how managers communicate, how progression is handled, and whether people feel that their contribution is seen. The travel employers who do this well are the ones whose people do not call us.
Retention IS Attraction: The Equation Most Employers Miss
The link between retention and attraction is not theoretical; it is operational. The conditions that make a tailor-made travel consultant want to stay are the same conditions that make a destination specialist want to join. A leisure travel business with low voluntary turnover has a story to tell at interview that a high-turnover business cannot: that people chose to stay.
Candidates in leisure travel are a sophisticated audience. They research employers before applying. They speak to people in their networks. The sector is smaller than it looks, and reputation travels quickly. An employer with a genuine track record of growing travel professionals, recognising contribution, and delivering on what they promise at interview will find their recruitment conversations materially easier than one who does not.
Conversely, a business with a pattern of losing luxury travel project managers or safari consultants at the 18-to-24 month mark will find that pattern increasingly difficult to break as word spreads. The best candidates have options. They will not take a risk on an employer whose people keep leaving.
What this means for employers: Review the last three people who left your business. What did they tell you when they resigned, and what do you actually think the real reason was? If there is a gap between those two answers, that gap is where your retention problem lives. Ambitions Travel Recruitment can help you identify and address it. Speak to the team today.
What This Means for Candidates
If you are a leisure travel professional considering a move, a tailor-made specialist wondering if you are ready, or a destination specialist who has been feeling restless for longer than you have admitted, the poll data probably reflects something you recognise. Feeling undervalued is the number one driver of resignation in this sector. It is not a minor complaint, and it is not something you need to apologise for.
The question worth asking is not ‘should I leave?’ but ‘are the conditions that are making me unhappy likely to change?’ A conversation with your manager about feeling undervalued is worth having, once. If the response is dismissive, or if the same conversation has happened before without result, that is useful information.
If salary is the reason you are considering moving, it is worth checking whether salary is really the issue, or whether it is the thing that has made you start counting the other things that are not working. Knowing the answer to that question makes you a better negotiator, whether you are negotiating with your current employer or choosing between two offers.
What this means for candidates: If this resonates with where you are right now, register your details at www.ambitionstravelrecruitment.com, and we will be in touch with any suitable opportunities.
The Takeaway
Why do leisure travel professionals really leave their jobs? Not primarily because of salary. Because of how they were, or were not, made to feel. Because of management that communicated distrust. Because of progression conversations that never went anywhere. Because the daily experience of their work did not match what they were told it would be at interview.
For employers in tailor-made travel, expedition, cruise, adventure travel, and UHNW concierge, the best retention strategy is also the best attraction strategy. Build a culture where travel professionals are genuinely recognised, genuinely developed, and genuinely managed, and the recruitment problem largely takes care of itself.
For candidates: know why you are looking, and be honest with yourself about whether it is a problem with the situation or a problem with the role. Ambitions Travel Recruitment can help you make that distinction and find the right next step when the time comes.
Related reading
Beyond Salary: What Leisure Travel Professionals Actually Want From Their Employer | Do Job Titles Still Matter in 2026? Travel Professionals Say Yes | Why Counter-Offers Feel Good… and Then They Don’t
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Ambitions Travel Recruitment is a boutique agency specialising in leisure travel, placing exceptional talent across the UK, South Africa, GCC, Asia and North America.
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FAQ’s
Retention is keeping the people you have. Attraction is bringing new people in. In practice, they require the same things: clear progression, genuine recognition, and a culture people want to stay in. If your retention is failing, your attraction proposition is almost certainly weaker than you think.
Feeling undervalued means your contribution is not being recognised, your voice is not being heard, or your development is not being taken seriously. In Ambitions Travel Recruitment’s April 2026 poll of leisure travel professionals, it was the single biggest reason people cited for leaving their last role, ahead of management, salary, and lack of progression.
Based on Ambitions Travel Recruitment’s April 2026 poll of travel professionals, the four most cited reasons are: feeling undervalued (34%), management issues (25%), no progression (20%), and salary (20%). Feeling undervalued consistently outperforms salary as the primary driver; people rarely leave purely for money.
If you are consistently feeling undervalued, have no clear path forward, or have stopped growing, those are reliable signals. The question is not whether you are unhappy today; it is whether the conditions that make you unhappy are likely to change. Ambitions Travel Recruitment can help you assess your options confidentially, with no obligation to move.
Not inherently. The travel industry understands that the right fit matters. What counts is how you frame it; being able to articulate what you learned and what you need next is more important than tenure. Ambitions Travel Recruitment regularly places candidates who have moved quickly from roles that were not the right match.
Usually, because they have been sending signals for months that were not picked up. Exit interview data consistently shows that people disengage long before they resign. By the time someone hands in their notice, the decision is almost always already made. Regular, honest one-to-ones are the most effective early warning system.
Industry estimates put replacement cost at between 50% and 200% of annual salary when you factor in lost productivity, recruitment fees, onboarding time, and the impact on team morale. In leisure travel, where specialist knowledge is hard to replace, the cost sits at the higher end of that range.
