ELITE TRAVEL TRENDS
ELITE TRAVEL TRENDS Matthew D. Upchurch Chairman and CEO, Virtuoso THE ROLE OF THE LUXURY TRAVEL ADVISOR Virtuoso Chairman and CEO Matthew D. Upchurch on the evolution of distribution via travel advisors…
Hotel & Tourism SMARTreport SPECIAL ISSUE #08 March 2017 13 Cleverdis editor-in-chief Richard Barnes caught up with the head of Virtuoso – the industry’s leading luxury travel network – at December’s ILTM show in Cannes. He asked what’s changed over time for the advisors and the way they work… Ten or fifteen years ago, if you became a travel advisor, you’d be given a cubicle and a GDS and maybe you would take a couple of fam trips a year. Today, however, travel advisors are at the forefront of being digital nomads. One agency owner came to our symposium in Cape Town, and went to check out one of the Singita properties. She posted a photo of herself and her number two in an infinity pool with elephants in the background and her laptop, saying, “Here we are checking out Singita and helping our clients all over the world.” I saw that photo and I went crazy. I said, “That’s the coolest thing I’ve seen!” Facebook went crazy with it as well. The next time she did a retreat with her staff members, this was the photo she posted on social media – at Eden Roc in St Barth. I showed this photo at Cornell to all the hotel management school kids, and I can tell you there’s a lot of people interested in being travel advisors now. How important is it to include owners and GMs in the picture? It’s very important, because there is a transmission of human connection. Many years ago, the GM of Sheen Falls was standing there at Virtuoso Travel Week, and at that time I had really started to THOSE HOTELS WHERE THE GM IS PERSONALLY INVOLVED IN THE RELATIONSHIPS GET A DISPROPORTIONATE AMOUNT MORE BUSINESS FROM THE NETWORK THAN THOSE THAT AREN’T notice the number of GMs that were coming to our meeting. I said to him, “I’m really curious. You’re a GM, and I am honoured that you are here, and I thank you for that… But I want to ask you a question from your perspective. Why did you, as a GM, bother to come?” He looked at me like I was an idiot, in a very nice way, and said, “Don’t you know?”… And I responded, “What do you mean?”… Then he said, “It is common knowledge among the hotels in Virtuoso that those hotels where the GM is personally involved in the relationships get a disproportionate amount more business from the network than those that aren’t. ” It was the same way back then for Antonio Sersale from Le Sirenuse in Italy… These days, I hold a brunch meeting before the opening session at the Bellagio just for owners. The phenomenon that began ten or fifteen years ago is gaining momentum. Now, at the brunch, I’ll be introducing the owner of the Brando, Richard Bailey, to other owners like Luke Bailes from Singita, and so on, and it keeps growing and growing. Now we have hotel owners walking around building relationships, because once you get to a certain level of luxury, you literally can feel a property based on the personality of not only the GM, but even more so the owner. It becomes very personal.
