US Travel Closing Kodiak Office

Jay Barrett/KMXT
Though it survived a prior consolidation and contraction of locations, U.S. Travel announced yesterday that it will be closing its Kodiak office this week. The company has been operating in Kodiak since 1991 when it purchased another travel agency.
Elizabeth Nerland is the marketing manager for U.S. Travel in Anchorage.
“Well, for the past several years we’ve actually be closing quite a few of our brick-and-mortar locations. Just moving a little bit more to a network and trying to stay open in the locations that make sense where it’s really important for there to be physically someone there,” she said. “But we really felt we could still serve the Kodiak community with our good solid network system, via the internet, and the phone.”
The closing could be attributed to a change in how individuals make vacation plans.
“We did not have as good of a volume, particularly for what the brick-and-mortar is there for, and that’s primarily vacation travel. We can service our corporate travel from just about anywhere in the world, but our vacation clients are the ones that are particularly interested in coming into the office and talk about their next vacation. And that was the line of business that we just didn’t see a lot of support for in the Kodiak community. Our volume of vacation sales was definitely below standard.”
Nerland says two of U.S. Travel’s three employees will be staying with the company, and may be the ones on the phone with potential travelers.
“We actually have two of the agents will work remotely, from their home, and become a part of the network, so really in a way we’re not even leaving the Kodiak co9mmunity, because we will be continuing to have agents right there in Kodiak. They’ll just be working satellite as a part of our network instead of in a physical location.”
Employees are closing up shop at the US Travel office this week, and Nerland says it’s essentially closed now, but will officially be gone by the end of the month.