How 11 Boutique Travel Agencies Joined Forces with Approach Guides to Drive Preferred Supplier Sales

When independently-owned travel agencies partner up to do collaborative marketing, magic can happen.

That’s exactly what the 11 Virtuoso agencies that form something they loosely call the Boutique Agency Collective have experienced since pooling their resources, both intellectual and financial. While not a formal collective, the agencies are combining their resources with one goal in mind: to focus on ways to grow their sales of Virtuoso’s preferred supplier partners. The results have been impressive, with the group’s preferred partner sales consistently outpacing the network averages.

The Collective is always looking for new ways to strengthen its promotion and sales of these travel partners, so when Virtuoso began offering marketing support through its partnership with Approach Guides, the group was quick to jump onboard.

“We started using Approach Guides because they have a relationship with Virtuoso and we love that a lot of the key partners of Virtuoso were signing up for Approach Guides,” said Jim Bendt, owner of Pique Travel, one of the 11 agencies that makes up the Boutique Agency Collective.  “It was specifically in the cruise area, so your Regent, Explora, Silversea. The more we got exposed to using it, the platform is so simple for an advisor just to send a one-to-one communication out.”

(In addition to Virtuoso, Approach Guides also works with Signature, Dream Vacations, Trevello, Cadence, Outside Agents, and Largay Travel, among others.)

For Virtuoso-member agencies, the resources Approach Guides provides includes not only what is available through its supplier partnerships (available to all travel advisors free of charge), but also Virtuoso-specific content.

But that wasn’t enough for the owners of the 11 agencies.

“The piece that was missing for us is that each agency also has our own individual needs,” Bendt said.

For instance, one agency might be offering a hosted sailing onboard a Silversea ship. As a collective, each of the 11 agencies in the group frequently markets each other’s hosted sailings to their own clients. But this type of marketing is manual and takes time.

“There wasn’t really a way for us to create it [marketing assets] in the same slick marketing platform.”

Partnering with Approach Guides Directly

The Collective reached out to Approach Guides about three months ago – Bendt has known owners Jennier and David Raezer for several years – to see if the company could create a solution that would allow the 11 agencies to create customized content specific to their needs (both for the individual agencies, as well as across all 11 agencies).

The answer was yes, and now the agencies have access not only to the supplier content and the Virtuoso content, but also two more tiers specific to them.

We asked Bendt for examples of what they’re using Approach Guides for.

“There are cases where somebody might have a food and wine expert. Or another person might have a meteorologist that wants to go down to Antarctica to talk about climate change. Now we can share that with the 11 agencies and say, if you have anyone that’s interested in food and wine or climate change, then we can build marketing pieces within Approach Guides and send that out. It benefits the greater good of all these agencies,” he said.

Though Approach Guides typically provides advisors with customizable micro-sites populated with content determined by a specific supplier, with the Boutique Agency Collective Approach Guides has created a library of branded web pages specific to their needs.

Owners can reach out to Approach Guides if they need something that doesn’t yet exist and request that something be created.

“This month, I wanted to raise awareness of this hosted Virtuoso voyage that’s being hosted by one of our members so that I can send it out to my clients,” Bendt said.

While using Approach Guides is typically free for advisors, for a use case like this, there is a fee, which the 11 agencies that make up the Boutique Agency Collective are splitting.

“This is exactly what we needed as a boutique agency,” Bendt told TMR. “A true win, win, win. Our advisors get an easy, scalable way to market the partners they believe in. Our suppliers see instant measurable results. And our clients get content worthy of the trips we’re designing. Technology should amplify relationships, not replace them, and that’s what Approach Guides does for us.”

TMR asked Bendt what level of success the 11 agencies have had with Approach Guides since partnering with the company. He told us that it’s still a bit too early to tell but added that interest from the advisors who work for the 11 agencies is high.

At a training last month on how to use the resource library that Approach Guides built for the Collective, more than 70 advisors attended.

“It’s really great because the engagement is definitely there,” he said. “We also have skin in the game. Each agency is investing, so each owner is really excited and motivated about this because there’s not really any other place where we can get partner content, Virtuoso content, your own agency content, and the Collective content all in one spot. Usually, we’d have to use four different platforms to try and get all that information.”

Can Any Agency Partner with Approach Guides?

We asked Jennifer Raezer, founder and CMO of Approach Guides, if this type of direct relationship with Approach Guides is appropriate for individual advisors or agencies.

“For individual agencies, the license is a greater investment than most small agencies are prepared to make,” she said.

Instead, she added, individual agencies and advisors should be looking at how to use the pre-designed supplier co-branded websites, which costs nothing for agencies and is available for virtually every cruise line, as well as several tour companies and more.

Alternatively, agencies and advisors should check with their Host agency or consortia to see if they have a direct partnership that supplies network-specific content.