PHOTO: Travvy Award winner John Lovell (seen here at the Travvy awards gala with TravelPulse founder Mark Murphy): "The idea is to match the right member for right preferred supplier to drive business…and go after the right quality agency."
Where is the largest travel agency group heading in 2015? Vacation.com this week provided an outlook for travel, based on surveys of its agency members, as well as an update on its membership and programs.
At a press event in New York City on Jan. 29, John Lovell, president of Vacation.com, which now calls itself a business solutions provider for its travel agent members, rather than a consortium, provided an extremely optimistic forecast for sales in 2015. But he and his team also spoke about how Vacation.com has grown over the last year and offered new information on the integration of the Cruise Holidays franchise network into Vacation.com.
They also gave a progress report on Agent Snapshot, part of the group's revamped consumer website; an update on the Vacation.com's annual conference, set for late April on Quantum of the Seas; and On Cue, an automated email program that recognizes client anniversaries, birthdays and other special events for member agencies. Here's a rundown on the major news from Vacation.com heading into 2015
A Growing Group
Vacation.com has long been the largest consortium or marketing network in terms of number of agencies and agency locations. Indeed, when it was first formed in the late 1990s by the merger of two competing agency groups, it had roughly 12,000 agency locations.
As agencies consolidated and closed in the first decade of the 21st century, Vacation.com's agency locations dipped below 5,000, but now, perhaps as evidence of the growing prosperity in the travel agency business, the group reports it has 5,500 agency locations, up significantly since last year. Part of that increase, of course, represents the integration of 200 outlets of Cruise Holidays, the franchise group owned by Vacation.com parent Travel Leaders Group, into Vacation.com itself.
"The Cruise Holidays integration went very well," said John Lovell, president of Vacation.com. "We're very pleased with way it was handled….We've kept the family atmosphere alive for [Cruise Holidays agents] with the same benefits" as well as additional Vacation.com programs. Lovell last week was named winner of a Travvy Award as "most innovative consortium executive."
Kevin Weisner, who formerly led Cruise Holidays, is now Vacation.com's vice president of sales, tasked with recruiting new members and making sure existing members are well served. Beyond the integration of Cruise Holidays agencies, Vacation.com has added 334 agency members in 2014 by focusing on agencies that it describes as "growers" and "creatives." That means agencies that are seeking to actively grow their business, as well as agencies that have a creative approach to the business, according to Weisner.
Weisner also has refocused Vacation.com's business development efforts for members by turning his sale team into business solutions managers, instead of account development managers, to make sure existing agency members are well served, as well as to attract new members.
"We're doing a deeper analysis of our members to figure out what one or two programs that we offer will best help them," Weisner said. "We now a lot of internal technology platforms…and one of our objectives is to go back to our existing members with those programs to tell them they aren't same program today that they were two years ago."
Weisner points to such programs as Vacation.com's CruisePRO and AirPRO booking solutions, as well as the new Agent Snapshot program to better market individual Vacation.com agencies and agents through the group's main website.
Overall, Vacation.com's goal is to get bigger, not necessarily in terms of number of travel agency locations, but in revenue. "We don't have a specific goal," said Lovell. "We don't want to go from 5,500 and 5,700 members and lose preferred supplier sales. The idea is to match the right member for right preferred supplier to drive business…and go after the right quality agency."
Cruise Holidays, which is 30 years old, has moved from a franchise to a membership model within Vacation.com. It will continue to support its consumer-facing brand and maintain the affinity of the Cruise Holidays group. On the other hand, Weisner says Cruise Holidays owners have seen a significant cost reduction, because they now pay Vacation.com's much lower membership fee instead of franchise fees.
At the same time, they have access to many more marketing, training and technology platforms through Vacation.com than they did at Cruise Holidays, though they will continue to use their group's proprietary AgentMate client management software. For example, they can now benefit from Vacation.com's Engagement marketing platform, as well as the CruisePRO and AirPRO booking engines.
Those benefits must have been enticing, because more than 95 percent of Cruise Holidays agents have migrated to Vacation.com, according to Lovell.
Agent Snapshot
Last June, Vacation.com unveiled plans to develop a new consumer-facing website using the Vacation.com name, which first debuted in the late 1990s, but has long been under-utilized. The idea was to have a section of the website, called Agent Snapshot, with profiles of Vacation.com member agents, including their photo, agency brand, background, specialties, destinations and geographical location. A number of other agency groups have embarked on similar programs.
At this week's press conference, Tiffany Glass, Vacation.com's chief operating officer, provided an update on the progress of Agent Snapshot. Vacation.com has enlisted a team of writers to help its agents with their profiles. It also has photographers at every event it holds to take photos of agents for those profiles and it is pre-populating the profiles with information about their agencies, as well as client reviews and recommendations, which also will appear on the website.
"We want to focus on making their profiles robust to convey their brand, interests and specialties, and where they can add value to consumer," Glass said. "The key is to make sure profile is localized, specialized and inspired."
With roughly 20,000 agents in the Vacation.com community, however, it has proven to be a long process to complete the program. Glass said 2,100 agents have started their profiles and 500 have completed them. The revamped website, including the Agent Snapshot profiles, will be released just after this year's Vacation.com conference in late April highlighting those agents who have complete profiles. Customers will be able to search for agents based on their location, destination expertise and specialties.
Vacation.com also has begun its search engine optimization (SEO) strategy to target consumers seeking out travel agents as well as those who are looking for a niche travel experience and require expertise. It also will turn to its preferred suppliers to help drive traffic to the revamped website from those consumers looking for a travel agent.
Vacation.com also will launch an interactive social media campaign, a new travel e-newsletter, advertising, videos and travel quizzes to give the website more visibility. Finally, it will have a blog on the site with dedicated articles written by Vacation.com travel agents and staffers.
"We want to get genuine leads they can convert," Glass said. "It's a quality game, not a quantity game. That content from completed profiles is going to help long-term, though we've got some good organic traffic today to the website."
Annual Conference
Vacation.com said its 2015 International Conference & Trade Show, which will place on Royal Caribbean's Quantum of Seas on April 24-May 2, is nearly sold out, with more than 1,100 attendees already booked. Featured speakers include Randy Garfield, former president Walt Disney Travel Company and former executive vice president and chief sales officer for Disney Destinations, and Michael Bayley, Royal Caribbean's new president and CEO.
With a Disney career spanning over 20 years, Garfield has led worldwide sales and group/convention services for its theme parks, resorts, cruise line and time share business and resort reservation centers. Vacation.com conference attendees will have the opportunity to attend a "Fireside Chat" and keynote speech by Garfield, who will discuss how persistence in business pays off when one is wise enough to act on it.
Other major events on Vacation.com's schedule this year include a cruise for top agents and supplier partners on Avalon Waterways' Illumination from Brussels to Amsterdam, March 23-28. This spring the group also will hold spring regional meetings in Tampa on Feb. 17, Fort Lauderdale on Feb. 19, Baltimore on May 20 and Chicago on May 28. Dates for fall regional meetings will be announced later in the year.
New "On Cue" Marketing
Vacation.com has introduced a new "On Cue" marketing program, in partnership with ClientBase, which enables members to select specialized, automated emails to be distributed to their clientele. The automatic emails generated by the program acknowledge birthdays and anniversaries, welcome new clients to an agency, thank clients for referrals, request travel preferences, provide passport expiration reminders and more.
The emails are customized with the member agent and agency's logo, location and email address, ensuring the agency remains top-of-mind with existing and prospective clients. Agencies that participate in Vacation.com's Engagement Select marketing program can have access to the program for $29 per month.
"On Cue is yet another great addition to our extensive marketing suite, and makes it easier and more efficient for our member agencies to communicate with their existing and prospective clients through automated, customized emails," said Lovell.
In other marketing news, Vacation.com has introduced a new functionality in its Engagement program that allows agency members to select clients who have already received direct mail or email over the past 30, 60 or 90 days so they won't be overwhelmed with promotions, especially if they've just come back from a trip.
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