Catching Up with Globus Family of Brands’ Cory McGillivray

While the Globus Family of Brands (GFoB) has never been a slacker when it comes to supporting the travel agency channel, 2024 saw the company invest on a level that exceeds anything its ever done.

In a single year, GFoB made the largest-ever contribution to ASTA, launched an all-new travel advisor portal and education platform, relaunched a newly revamped digital asset management tool, unveiled an all-new FAM program, and restructured and expanded its trade-focused marketing and sales team.

The company didn’t stop its trade investment there. In the first two months of 2025, GFOB has expanded its sales team in Canada and rolled out a massive in-person training program across the U.S. and Canada.

TMR recently caught up with Globus’ senior director of sales operations and channel marketing Cory McGillivray at one of those in-person events to find out what’s behind the unprecedented investments.

“Advisors are the backbone of this industry,” McGillivray told us. “If we don’t support them, it’s unfair request to say, hey, we want your support… We want to arm advisors with the tools today to be successful tomorrow.”

While he told us, the “idea is to strike while the iron is hot,” Globus has been working on several of these initiatives for quite some time, going back to the later COVID-19 years when travel was either shutdown or slowly returning.

“I think a lot of suppliers during those years were saying, how do we stay relevant?” he said.

The inception of several of GFoB’s new initiatives were the result of trying to answer that question and trying to prepare for the return of travel that everyone knew would eventually come.  

“These are projects that we started in late ’21 into 22,” McGillivray explained, just in time to help advisors be prepared for the resurgence of travel.

New FAM Program

Of all the new initiatives Globus has launched, McGillivray told TMR he’s most excited about the new FAM program, which he called a “full circle approach.”

Advisors who are accepted into a FAM have pre-work to do, must commit to certain experiences during the trip, and will work with their BDM after the FAM to increase their sales.

“Not a lot of suppliers provide the resources to come home and sell more. We’re making the investment in them and the tri, but it’s also that piece when they come home and we say, here’s the clients you need to be reaching out to now. Here’s how you need to capture the experience you had and share that with your clients, and here’s how to close that business,” he explained.

He added that while GFoB hopes advisors will sell Globus tours and Avalon Waterways cruises after a FAM, what’s most important is that advisors are better educated and more empowered than they were before the FAM.

“Hopefully, it’s with Globus, hopefully, it’s with Avalon. But our goal as a supplier is not just to be an advocate for our product. We genuinely take the approach of we want an advisor to walk away and be a better businessperson,” McGillivray said.

It’s really two different types of ROI (return on investment), he explained.

“There’s financial ROI, but then there’s also advocacy and the support of the channel,” he said.

Executive Summits

As GFoB’s executive team dove into planning its refreshed investment in the travel agency channel, they stopped to reflect on who they might not be serving. With the new tools, in-person events, and FAM program, Globus has the support of and the interaction with the frontline selling advisor covered. But what about owners, they wondered.

“There’s another echelon of people that we need to chat with to make sure we’re all on the same page,” McGillivray explained. “The Executive Summit solves that kind of middle ground, agency owners of large powerful agencies in the region that we need to make sure that they feel heard as well… almost like a pulse check with those leaders within the industry outside of consortia heads…”

The Executive Summits – there are four in the U.S. and two in Canada this year – are a mix of fun activities and meaningful meetings between agency owners and GFoB executives during which Globus will share normally internal-facing information, as well as business insights. The meetings will also “help us shape what we’re trying to do,” McGillivray added.

Renewed & Distinct Canada Investment

At the same time that that Globus was rolling out new tools, resources, and in-person events, the company was also building its sales teams – in both the U.S. and Canada. Just last month, the company appointed a managing director of sales for Canada to oversee the larger Canadian-focused sales team.

“We are very aware that we operate in two different markets. While yes, the resources are shared across North America, we’re also very honest with ourselves that there are different markets needs and different product differentiations,” McGillivray said. “We want to make sure that Canadians understand, we don’t look at them as just an extension of the U.S. business.”

Canada has its own inside sales team – if a Canadian calls into the reservation center, they get a Canadian res agent (unless it’s very busy and then calls might be patched over to a U.S. agent). There also might be different promotions for Canadian travelers.

“We actually out index the amount of folks that we have dedicated to our Canadian travel agencies, which exceeds the proportion of sales within our network,” he added.

When TMR asked McGillivray about that over-indexing, he pointed to the huge untapped potential in the Canadian market, especially on the river side.

“There’s a huge opportunity to grow and to saturate the market a bit more,” he said.