Headquarter Happenings – Ensemble Looks to Fill Gaps in Member Services (Part II)

With an eye on the future, Ensemble is focused on building a tech stack designed to maximize agencies’ sales and bring efficiencies to agency operations. This tech stack was on full display at last week’s Ensemble Horizons conference held at Resorts World in Las Vegas.

Advisors were offered multiple sessions on how to book air and hotel in ADX, as well as get an introduction to the new Air Concierge team. (Both detailed in Ensemble Looks to the Future.)

ADX wasn’t the only tool discussed at this year’s Horizon.

New tools

To help determine where Ensemble can have the most impact, beyond making selling travel more efficient and profitable, the census asked advisors to share the worst parts of their job.

“Not be negative but so that we can understand where we can help with some of those points,” said Ensemble’s senior vice president of member relations, Kristina Boyce. “We exist as a solutions provider, and we take that responsibility very seriously.”

One of the most glaring findings was members’ dissatisfaction with whatever system they were using for customer relations management. Across the board, the net promoter score for members’ CRMs was negative 20 (-20).

“You were dissatisfied with your current CRM. We heard you loud and clear,” said Ensemble’s senior vice president of marketing, Shahla Lalani.

As a result, Ensemble introduced a new partnership with HubSpot, a CRM, marketing, and sales tool.

“With HubSpot, you’re able to have all your customer information and your marketing data all in one place,” Lalani added.

The system should also help advisors save time and more easily stay in contact with their clients, through every phase of their planning, booking, and travel journey.

The HubSpot partnership is brand new. Advisors had the opportunity to learn more about it at this year’s conference and sign up for it. Ensemble will help advisors migrate over from their old CRMs, but Boyce admitted much of the migration might have to be manual.

Member portal

First teased at last year’s conference, the new member portal went live this past June. Boyce described it as the “front door to Ensemble,” built with direct feedback and beta testing from both members and supplier partners.

During her presentation, she shared a few of her favorite features of the new member portal including a bookmark tool, a notifications and news feed, and global search, which she said means advisors can treat the member portal “like Google.”

Boyce told TMR that Ensemble is still putting the final touches on the member portal, working to make it more seamless and efficient.

“We want to make sure that something that used to take seven clicks, now takes one,” she said.

The member portal is also where advisors can go to “slice and dice” the consortium’s large list of supplier partners to find the best fit for their clients, said Beth Butzlaff, Ensembles senior vice president of partner relations.

Hotel to cruise transfers

Butzlaff made one of the most interesting announcements of this year’s conference – the introduction of a hotel and cruise transfer program, which hasn’t actually gone live yet, but will debut by the start of 2025, if not sooner, Butzlaff told TMR.

“Seventy-one percent of you said you wanted a hotel and cruise program,” Butzlaff said.

“We weren’t sure what the response would be from the hotels, because this is a hotel amenity, but they were over the moon,” she said.

Starting in four domestic port cities – Miami, Ft. Lauderdale, Seattle, and Vancouver – a selection of preferred hotels will provide a free transfer to the port for Ensemble agencies’ cruise clients.

“This is just the beginning,” she said, adding that no other consortium is offering this service. “The intention is really to go into Europe and do the same thing around the world.”

Amenity programs

While not new, this year’s cruise amenity program has been expanded to 5,000 amenity sailing dates.

What is new in the cruise program are hosted group sailing dates that center on a specific theme, such as adventure, women’s solo travelers, LGBTQ+ and more.

“With our hosted program, we are focusing on specific audiences… So that you know, when you have a client that is in one of these specific groups, when they get onboard they have an instant community,” Butzlaff said.

Starting next year, Ensemble is rolling out a hotel program offering up 1,000 properties that will offer exclusive perks that could include room upgrades, breakfast, late checkout, and more.

Education and certification

Another area of focus for Ensemble over the past year has been education. New this year is the Ensemble Certification program, which launched at the end of last month.

Boyce called the program Ensemble’s “stamp of credibility,” telling advisors they can get certified in a travel vertical (cruise, insurance), a niche (luxury, celebrations), or in a destination. Certification has several layers and can take upwards of 15 hours of learning.

Benefits of certification range from reduced rates to Ensemble events, exclusive collateral to use in marketing, and priority hosting for Ensemble hosted cruises.

Sales growth

When asked about sales trends for the year, Ensemble president Michael Johnson and Boyce told TMR that adventure travel and luxury travel are seeing double digit growth. Luxury cruise is up 31% year over year. Overall cruise is also growing, though the trajectory of that growth has slowed from last year.

Ensemble also has more agencies reaching top seller status than ever before.

While Johnson said there are several macro-economic reasons behind the growth in sales, he also believes Ensemble’s efforts to maximize agency’s sales are paying off.

“We want to free advisors up from administrative work so they can spend more time selling travel, the result of which should be more advisors increasing their sales. We are already starting to see that through ADX.”

And it’s not just the large host agencies reaching top seller status. Six of the 14 top-producing agencies are non-hosts.