Luxury Gold’s Rebrand Is All About Exclusivity

This week, Luxury Gold, the high-end tour brand from The Travel Corporation (TTC), kicked off 2023 by unveiling a rebrand of its offerings and marketing.

The goal, according to Luxury Gold’s announcement on Tuesday, is to cater to more affluent consumers, with higher budgets than pre-pandemic, who are increasingly excited about international travel. It’s also to lean into what the company believes to be an important part of what luxury travelers now want, Melissa Da Silva, president of Luxury Gold, North America, told TMR on Thursday.

“Part of it was a facelift and part of it was some changes we did make to the product, really just to elevate and differentiate it from other TTC brands. We wanted Luxury Gold to stand out from the rest of the brands as a true luxury experience versus a premium experience,” she said.

While there’s been a lot of talk about the shifting definition of luxury travel and what it means, for Luxury Gold, one of the most important parts of modern luxury travel is exclusivity. Access to experiences that general travelers don’t get, combined with high touch service, five-star accommodations, and small group size (no more than 20 for Luxury Gold), is now very much part of that definition and what the brand is focusing on this year.

“Our guests are people that want what they have at home when they are traveling—five-star hotels and other accommodations, Michelin dining. More importantly, they are looking for exclusivity, access to things that other people don’t necessarily have access to,” she told TMR.

In Ireland, for instance, Luxury Gold offers guests a tour of Dublin’s Little Museum, but far beyond what general guests get to see. Luxury Gold’s guests get to see the museum after hours, with the museum’s curator Trevor Wright alongside them. And, in France, the operator offers access to a private concert at Avignon’s Palais des Papes, exclusive for its guests.

It’s that thought that helped Luxury Gold with one of two major shifts in the rebrand—the curation of Passport Moments. Rather than traveling to fill their passport with stamps from foreign countries, guests are wanting to fill them with experiences like that Little Museum tour or Palais des Papes concert. The other change was renaming the Chairman’s Collection to the Founder’s Collection in honor of the late Stanley Tollman.

Da Silva told TMR that the hope is the rebrand will continue to propel Luxury Gold forward and take advantage of a strong luxury market that isn’t showing any signs of slowing down despite worries about an economic downturn or rising prices.

“Luxury is one of the more resilient segments of the market, even if we were staring down the barrel of a recession,” she said. “Even during the global financial crisis, luxury was much less impacted.”

For 2023, Da Silva said Luxury Gold is expecting passenger numbers to be flat with 2019, but because of market issues, revenues are going to exceed 2019.