Vendors Are More Important than Clients – Here’s Why

Heresy, I Know

The mantras in a service business are that we live and die by our customers, that the customer is the most important thing. We come up with ways of speaking about our customers that indicate who we think they are and how we believe they should be treated. In the hospitality industry, customers are often called guests; in my luxury agency we use “client.”

Who am I to dare say that supplier relationships are more important than client relationships? It’s heresy, I know. But indulge me just a minute. Consider your very most important supplier relationship, the one that if that supplier were to shut down tomorrow your own business would suffer. Now, think of your closest supplier relationship (a BDM, account manager, etc.) Does your closest contact work for your most important supplier? Would your supplier relationship suffer if your best contact left? And if they left, would you leave your supplier and follow them to a comparable brand?

Incredibly Rare

The truth is that quality BDMs are incredibly rare. It can be hard to find a match for your business. The best BDMs, in my experience, listen to you first before deciding how to approach facilitating your needs and placing opportunities in front of you.

As large as the luxury travel industry is, it’s still a very small world after all. When a BDM changes companies, they usually pop up at one of their competitors still in a similar business line (river cruise, expedition, resort, etc.) and either at the same level or a little higher. Not all industries are like that, and not all industries share the same lifelong career dedication as ours.

There are plenty of bad BDMs too. Those that are just going through the motions or applying a broad brush to all their customers including you. In my experience, the BDMs that I don’t bother to spend my time on are the ones that don’t understand my business and why it’s unique to all others. They distribute the same cookie cutter materials and look to host webinars with our team on topics that aren’t important to us – but are important to them.

The BDMs that learn your business and find ways to help you reach your own goals within the context of their product – those are the best. But they are rare. And the ones that you really like, the relationships where you’d still call them if you sold your business tomorrow, these are Hope Diamond of supplier relationships.

How many of those do you have? How many of those folks would consider you to be the same level of importance in their lives both professionally and personally?

The Doors They Can Open

Supplier contacts that really understand you can open doors that completely change your business. Our margins doubled in 2024 and are on pace to triple 2023 levels because of a specialty rate program an important supplier opened for us. It was based on the challenges we were facing in the market and overcoming our competition. With the right door opened, our business changed entirely. It changed how we work with that supplier, the value we deliver for our clients, and how we approach other supplier relationships.

Another Luxury Customer is Born Every Minute

It’s far easier to find a new luxury customer than it is to find a quality BDM that can have a dramatic effect on your business. I’m more apt to tell a customer “no” than peer agencies when it would put my supplier in a tough position. I can’t afford to burn through an incredibly narrow talent pool for the sake of a client that may be unreasonable or in the wrong.

Every day, the global population grows larger than the day before and despite the doom and gloom you may see on the news, more and more luxury customers are coming into our market every day. Despite domestic and global inflation, more and more are being lifted out of poverty every day, and more people are moving from the middle class to ascending wealth.

It’s pretty rare to see a new supplier breathed into existence, and the ultimate rarity is that they would enter the scene with entirely new players, all from outside of the industry. So, we must be careful with our vendor relationships, treat them delicately, ensure they are not a one-way street – these are our business partners, friends, and colleagues. And as much as it’s business sin to say it, our vendor relationships are simply more important than customer relationships.

Kyle Stewart has been a travel writer for over a decade and appeared in the Wall Street Journal, TIME, Forbes, Travel & Leisure, among other publications. He runs Scott & Thomas, a luxury travel agency, and splits time between Pittsburgh and Fort Myers when he isn’t traveling with his family of four.