Sold Out Travel Market Place West Opens in Vancouver

Some 300 Canadian travel advisors, and more than 100 supplier partners came from areas in and around British Columbia and Alberta, and as far away as Saskatchewan to attend Travel Market Place West 2024. For the second year in a row, the show is sold out.

“We’re thrilled to be here with you,” said Brian Israel, publisher of Travel Market Report. “You are 100% going to walk away from this conference energized, excited, and full of great ideas.”

“This is a rich and complex industry where partnership means everything, whether it’s your loyalty to your host, your agency owners, most of all your customers, we are all in this together,” added Geraldine Ree, TMP emcee, author, and performance strategist.

The conference kicked off Monday night with the Ambassador program, an invitation-only gathering of more than 60 travel advisors for three hours of small group meetings with suppliers. The first morning of the full two-day conference started with Ree asking the audience to turn to the person next to them and verbalize what they wanted to get out of the conference.

New ideas, inspiration, learning, and building relationships were some of the common answers advisors shared with each other.

Afterwards, Dan McCarthy, Travel Market Report’s editor-in-chief and vice president, was joined on stage for three fireside-style chats with advisors who have been in the industry between 10 and 45 years.

“I think everybody who is sitting here in the audience is about making a difference. And I learned that if you make a difference in just one person’s life, that you change the world. And I want you always to feel real good about that,” said Randi Winter, co-founder of The P2P Life, who has been in the industry for more than 45 years.

Group advice
Winter shared her approach to building groups.

It starts with having a passion and a connection to a destination or a person or a topic.

“It’s about building on a passion because then your enthusiasm will never waver,” she said. “You may get discouraged but your enthusiasm because you believe deeply, because you care about something. I think that’s very important.”

She added that doesn’t believe advisors should limit themselves to one pied piper.

“Look for a small group of people who are passionate about the same thing and then instead of having one pied piper, you have many raving fans who people respect.”

You can also groom people, she said. “Maybe it’s not for this year. You have to have a long tail approach.”

Growing with your clients
Next on stage was Tara Kurtz, an advisor with Expedia Cruises, who got a laugh out of the audience when she told McCarthy her original perception of what it meant to be a travel advisor was working in a random office in a mall. “People go in, they sit at a desk, they book the trips, and they go home and that was the end of their work day.”

Kurtz also spoke about how her business has changed, and how her clients have grown along with her.

“You have to find your starting place,” she said. “My starting place was know what you know and go with that. My demographic at that time was all-inclusive resorts, Disney resorts, and young families because that’s what I had and that’s what I knew.”

Over time Kurtz’s interests and demographic changed. Today she sells mostly cruises.

“When I first started doing more cruises, I had a lot of clientele that were doing the insides, the ocean views. Now, they’ve grown with me, they’re the balconies, they’re the suites. They’re into river cruising, they’re moving into luxury so as I’ve grown, they’ve grown.”

It’s a trend she said she’s especially noticed over the past two years.

Kurtz spoke briefly about finding clients on social media, as well, telling the audience that Facebook groups have been especially helpful to her over the 10 years she’s been a travel advisor.

Rather than travel Facebook groups, she belongs to more community-oriented groups, like mom’s groups where she participates in the mom-related discussions but also makes her travel expertise known.

Being active in these groups has helped grow her referral business, because if a travel question comes up – even if Kurtz doesn’t see it – someone else, whether a past client or not, will tag her so that she knows to reach out to the person asking the question.

A word on A.I.
In his third and final hot seat of the first day, McCarthy spoke with Gina Afan, branch coordinator for Transat Travel, who first joined the industry some 35 years ago.

Afan spoke briefly about why artificial intelligence isn’t a threat to travel advisors.

“I think it’s really personal experience, knowledge, getting to know the supplier partners, and being able to explain to clients why you would recommend thing over another. This [AI] is just a machine. It’s a robot. They don’t have the experience for you, and I think people gravitate to that.”