Growing up up in Africa, Jeff Willner spent most of his time on the shores of Lake Tanganyika. Willner's love for the African wilderness and for exploration led to his becoming a Royal Geographic Society Fellow. But he also had a penchant for information technology, leading him to co-found what became Microsoft's top training center for programmers and Web developers in North America.
When he started Kensington Tours in 1999, his aspiration was to create a great safari company. But as a technologically oriented person he was surprised at how poorly developed technology was for the safari industry. He set out to create a state-of-the-art IT system for Kensington, investing $3 million to develop a system that would eventually run 200 destination management offices around the world.
In 2008, Kensington launched a giant database of options on its website. Expecting to see a surge in business, the company instead saw its business cut in half. That's when Kensington learned that disintermediation, selling directly over the Internet to consumers, was not the way to build a travel business. He realized that people need consultants when they are trying to arrange trips to exotic places. Kensington started cultivating relationships with travel agents.
"What we realized is that it's very important if someone is booking travel that they have a real conversation with somebody early on in the process," said Willner. "So by the fall 2008, we completely changed our philosophy as a company and decided to engage with the travel industry. And we launched our first agent portal in December 2008."
That was when Kensington Tours' business started to take off. Willner realized that no matter how sophisticated the technology that he could provide his guests, people booking travel needed the human touch.
"When I was in computer training in '95 the Internet was taking shape and we thought now that the Internet is here, the instructor will talk to students on a video screen and that's going to be end of classrooms as we know them," said Willner. "So people put a lot of money into that. But the key thing that people forgot is human nature. We're social creatures, we have certain habits and ways we make decisions. So classroom training actually went up because the Internet represented more complexity, more problems to be solved. People flocked in greater numbers to the classroom to be in front of an instructor or have someone look over their shoulder and give them the comfort that they were on the right track."
The same thing happened in the travel industry. After Willner recognized it, his business took off. Today his judgments have been acknowledged by a community of travel agents who are grateful to Kensington for providing a worldwide database as well as a team of counselors.
Today, building on the premise of combining high technology with the personal touch of travel agents, Kensington has built its business to the point that it offers custom private-guided tours to more than 90 countries worldwide.
The personal touch comes courtesy of Kensington's secret weapons, their more than 70 Destination Experts, the Travvy Awards winners for Most Innovative Escorted Tour or FIT Executives. This group of skilled specialists have on-the-ground experience in the 90 destinations they service -- they have lived, studied, guided, trekked, researched, eaten, taught and volunteered in the countries in which they are advise agents on.
They customize each itinerary, so clients can mix and match what matches their tastes -- whether it be a premium tour, active adventure or the most exclusive, highest-end accommodations or activities -- to create the vacation of a lifetime.
The flexibility of Kensington's offerings allows for personalization of every tour at a wide range of price points - resulting in a handcrafted vacation experience at 20-30 percent less than identical tours from premium group operators. Kensington Tours was named one of the Best Adventure Travel Companies on Earth twice by the editors of National Geographic Adventure magazine.
Willner sees an even better future for travel agents than is now being realized. "I'm firmly convinced," he said, "that there's a new renaissance for travel agents coming in an era where technology matures in travel and gives agents a vast amount of new capabilities that they're not paying an arm and a leg to get, where it comes back to value of their relationships and they have the ability to charge what I think they are worth."
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