ELITE TRAVEL TRENDS
ELITE TRAVEL TRENDS Ignacio Maza Executive Vice President, Signature Travel Network SAME SIGNATURE – NEW AMBITIONS The Signature Travel Network adds new hotels and points of sale The Signature Travel Network continues to re-invent itself, developing new programmes and tools to make its members more effective and more relevant to consumers and travel partners. We asked the member-owned network’s Executive Vice President, Ignacio Maza to tell us more. priorities for 2018 include leveraging Signature’s 1-to-1 marketing tools and developing new Digital tools, especially compelling content for social media. This year, we welcomed 11 new leading travel sellers to our network, including Adelman Vacations and Hess Travel in the USA, as well as the Magellan Travel Group in Australia. Signature now generates over USbn in travel sales, and has over 7,000 consultants worldwide. We added over 100 new hotels, destination specialists, tour operators, cruise lines and tourism offices to our portfolio of preferred partners, as well as the industry’s first preferred supplier agreement with TCS World Travel. We expanded our database to over 4.5 million names and launched new consumer benefits. We continue to invest in technology, ensuring consultants have access to turnkey, highly customised marketing and client relationship management tools to better serve travellers. What were some of the highlights of your 2017 annual sales meeting in Vegas? Our 2017 Sales Conference was our biggest and best ever, including over 1,400 consultants and 900 preferred partners worldwide. We offered over 50 different seminars and workshops, as well as one-onone appointments and business sessions. Key announcements were that the network enjoyed sales growth across all segments – hotel, tour and cruise – and advance sales for 2018 are even stronger than same time last year, with Luxury travel growing fastest. We saw a big rebound in Europe in 2017. Automation and creating efficiencies for consultants remain priorities, which includes enhancements to Signature’s propriety mobile itinerary application, Pocket Travel Consultant, and the launch of new B2C hotel booking engine. Marketing What do you see as being the key trends in luxury travel as we enter 2018? Our future booked business for 2018 is very strong. 2018 is shaping to be a robust year for travel to Europe, South Pacific, Hawaii, South/East Africa, North America, as well as Japan and Southeast Asia. Consumers are looking for new horizons, so we are seeing more inquiries for far-flung destinations. We are increasing sales for multi-generation/ family travel, celebration-related travel, active/adventure travel, as well as solo travel. Overall, travellers are seeking once-in-alifetime experiences, expert advice, access to special venues and personalities, unique itineraries, meaning, fulfilment, and a sense of wonder in their travels. Expectations are high, but we are confident that we can deliver results
Hotel & Tourism SMARTreport #37 2018 Winter Edition 19 VIRTUOSO PROMOTES A SUSTAINABLE FUTURE Chairman and CEO Matthew D. Upchurch on the greening of travel and tourism Virtuoso has just released a new whitepaper on sustainable tourism. We asked Matthew Upchurch to tell us more. At our recent sustainability summit, I was sitting there with massive companies like Royal Caribbean and AccorHotels but also smaller companies like Aqua Expeditions, Nomadic Expeditions or Wilderness Safaris. We are not a certification organisation and we don’t want to be, so what is our role? We are squarely in the commercial aspect of travel and we are squarely in the consumer influence part of that, so the basic outcome of sustainability is that we feel that our core focus should be “How do we help make sustainability a greater factor in consumer choice, so that we can play an active role in making those people that are doing the best sustainability work also the most commercially successful?” We can align sustainability with commercial success by being part of that solution. That’s the best impact we could have on the industry and on the topic and that’s what we are doing henceforth. How is the Virtuoso network moving forward with its sustainability policies? First of all, practice what you preach. I have to give my wife total credit, as half way through 2016, knowing that 2017 was the UNWTO’s International Year of Sustainable Tourism for Development, she said, “I have an idea for the next year. We are going to plan all our family travel around Virtuoso leaders in sustainable tourism”. So, we started in November last year with The Brando, and I am still showing photos. It’s an incredible place, then we went to New Zealand, also exceptional, and continued on. We just added our first “voluntourism” company - ME to WE - out of Toronto. As Richard Branson said, we can only advance the environmental movement if we “shame and blame”. There is proven scientific evidence that human beings will only alter a behaviour for a short period of time based on fear, and one of the greatest examples of that comes from Brené Brown and one of her books. She cites the example of people who have had near death cardiac experiences. Then they are told by their doctors if you don’t change this or this, you will die. You know what the outcome of that is? 80% of people who had serious cardiac problems die exactly because they didn’t take action on those simple things, or they did for only a short time. The evidence goes to show that the only way you can change somebody’s behaviour longterm is by painting the picture of what the future could be and showing a potential path of how to get there … … Extract from an exhaustive interview undertaken at ILTM, Cannes in December 2017, available on www.hotelandtourismonline.com. Matthew Upchurch receives the Mary Gostelow award for industry achievement from travel “guru” Mary Gostelow (left) and ILTM portfolio manager Alison Gilmore (right)
