Travel Corp. CEO Sees ‘Huge Opportunity’ in Tour Segment

This summer Brett Tollman, CEO of The Travel Corporation, traveled with his family to Kenya on a sustainable volunteer vacation. While there, the Tollmans and their fellow travelers learned about the daily lives of Maasai Mara villagers. They helped build a college that will provide advanced education to community members, and they saw firsthand how sustainable development projects are benefiting local communities.

“[T]his was one of the most meaningful journeys I have ever had with my family,” Tollman wrote in a blogpost about the trip, which is one of a number of immersive volunteer itineraries offered by several Travel Corporation brands in partnership with the Canadian social enterprise firm Me to We. 

Tollman is passionate about the need for such “purpose-driven” travel in today’s world. He also sees consumer demand for this type of sustainable travel growing in tandem with the hunger for other types of immersive vacation experiences.

Travel Market Report sat down with Tollman not long after his return from Kenya to hear his thoughts on what’s trending in tours and learn how The Travel Corporation and its 30 brands support their travel agent partners.

Where do you see the biggest opportunities in the tour segment?
We all know that people are looking for meaningful, immersive experiences –– meet the locals, dine in people’s homes (etc.) –– where you get to really taste and experience. We think the opportunity is huge. Our challenge is changing perceptions, be they of the consumer or the travel advisor. There is still a lagging perception of what a tour or a guided vacation is today.

What are examples of those types of meaningful experiences?
Trafalgar has Be My Guest: You’ll go to Sorrento [Italy] to someone’s lemon grove. You’ll meet the family, they’ll cook a dinner for you overlooking the Bay of Naples and talk about their lives, how they get their lemons to market. You taste the limoncello. It’s very immersive.

We’ve added these new VizEat experiences. They have 25,000 in-home dining experiences in 110 countries. It’s like Airbnb, but for dining. These are now built into some of our itineraries for 2018 on Trafalgar, Insight, Luxury Gold, Uniworld, U by Uniworld and Contiki. It’s very much what people are looking for today, and it really updates the guided vacation experience.

What else is new?
Obviously U by Uniworld, our new brand for 21 to 45 year olds that we’re very excited about. Eighty million people fit into that age demographic in America. We think there’s a big opportunity in the market. A great river cruise experience is relevant to anyone.

The other one is sustainable travel or purpose-driven travel. That’s certainly growing. We’re all part of a global community. We all have a role to play in helping to protect the planet. That’s very important to me personally, and I think it’s what more and more travelers, affluent or otherwise, are looking for today –– a different, more meaningful experience. They want to give back in a local community. We’d love to get more advisors behind that.

What are your initiatives in the sustainable and purpose-driven travel space?
Our nonprofit, the TreadRight Foundation, takes some of our profits and puts them into helping to protect and preserve the places and the communities we take travelers to. We’ve signed a wildlife protection welfare manifesto and taken circuses and elephant riding and shark diving out of our experiences. And we support some amazing organizations, including the Happy Hearts Fund, which has built over 120 schools in devastated areas, and Me to We.

How do you support travel agents in selling the types of vacation experiences your brands offer?
We pay top commissions. We pay great incentives. We provide marketing support to our travel trade partners, and we advertise in trade publications.

We have our TTC Agent Academy. Trafalgar, Insight, Contiki, Uniworld all have online training segments so advisors can learn what’s new and different. We’ve trained our sales team in the consultative sales process, which is listening and asking questions of travel advisors so we can better understand who their customers are and what they are looking for and better match our itineraries to the customer.

Then it’s getting the advisors to take meetings with us, to attend the webinars, to do the online trainings and to take our familiarization trips. I very much believe in the agent joining one of our actual trips, even if it’s not for the complete itinerary, because one of the beauties of the guided vacation is the group dynamic.

We’ve also developed for each of our brands key talking points. Our sales team makes sure when they leave a sales call or webinar or training that the three to four key points that a travel advisor must remember about each one of our brands are there. We’ve tried to simplify that.

We also added 18 more in-house sales people on the East Coast to support and help train and advise our travel partners. [The Travel Corporation opened an office in New York City earlier this year.]