Excite Holidays is fresh off the heels of its U.S. launch party, held at The London, West Hollywood in Los Angeles.
The Sydney, Australia-based company now offers travel sellers in the States an online booking platform with a vast portfolio and easy-to-use technology, but its priority is the travel agent.
"Excite Holidays' number-one goal is to make our travel agent's look like rock stars in front of their clients. Our duty of care is second to none always ensuring this is the case," said Nicholas Stavropoulos, executive director and co-founder of Excite Holidays.
Stavropoulos noted that Excite's U.S. debut has been 15 years in the making.
"The U.S. is an extremely important part of our global strategy," he said. "The U.S. is the largest single travel economy in the world and, after many other global successes, it is now time to provide our award-winning Excite Holidays offering to this market."
Because of Excite's commitment to the travel agent, the timing for its stateside launch had to be just right.
"The U.S. has always been one of our target markets, but we could not enter such a significant market without being 100 percent ready," Stavropoulos said. "We enter the U.S. with true 24/7, 365 customer service support and a world-class offering, including a booking engine that has been specifically developed to cater to travel agents' needs."
One of the key features of Excite Holidays is this booking platform, Engage, which provides agents with access to the company's more than 250,000 hotels and apartments, 50,000 activities and tours and transfers in more than 100 countries.
"Engage is an agent's one-stop shop for the need to know in selling destinations and dream vacations," said Vanessa Richards, global head of marketing. "Agents can discover full comprehensive destination landing pages to explore, downloadable consumer-friendly destination guides that can be printed and passed on to their clients."
She also noted that Excite offers exclusive hotel deals, shares industry news and promotes its exclusive agent incentives on its blog.
"We want our agents to connect with Engage daily, read, learn, be inspired, have some fun and make their clients' travel dreams come true with their new-found knowledge," she said.
Everything Excite creates is with the travel agent in mind, first and foremost.
"Agents are the travel experts, however, we understand their lives are becoming increasingly busier," Richards noted. "Most don't have the time to travel the world and do the hours of research associated with finding out whats new in each location. So we have done that for them and pulled together what we believe is the very best of each destination. Things that will get their clients excited and booking their vacations."
Excite gives agents access to what's hot, where to eat, what to see, what to do and, most importantly, where to stay.
"All our agents need to do is pass this information on, like it is their own firsthand knowledge," said Richards.
In order to ensure that Excite is providing agents with the very best content, the company also partners with many tourism boards that provide market exclusive information for Engage.
"Everything our agents read, is researched and written in-house by my editorial content team, meaning the information is fresh and from firsthand experiences," said Richards. "The content is suited to all ages and all travel types. We really have something here for everyone."
Ultimately, Excite wants agents to know that the focus is on them and the platform is centered around what they need most.
"Our goal is to always be made for agents," said Richards, "so this platform is an agent's right-hand man, a tool to assist them in selling the travel dream on to their clients."
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