Established 58 years ago, Signature Travel Network has long been identified with its charismatic and savvy president and CEO, Michelle Morgan, who lost her battle with cancer last year. We sat down with the company’s new CEO and president, Alex Sharpe, to discuss how the company has poised itself for growth going forward. Twenty-three years ago, Sharpe said Signature produced revenue in the $30 million range and this year expects that figure to grow to nearly $6 billion.

TravelPulse: When was Signature conceived and how has it changed and evolved over the years?

Alex Sharpe: A little California cooperative named Leisure Travel Group was started in 1956.  Then 23 years ago, Michelle Morgan was hired and her focus was to create a centralized data base and more national deals.

About eight or nine years ago we brought in executive vice president Ignacio Maza. That was also really the time when we planted our flag on the East Coast and really started to expand beyond the Rockies. Before that it was a rather small cooperative with a few players here and there — but really and truly focused still on the West Coast.

Michelle had an impeccable reputation, particularly on the West Coast, and Ignacio had an impeccable reputation on the East Coast, and we started picking up agencies and really doing a good job for them. It continued to expand from there.

I think one of the other inflection points for us was just before Ignacio came on we hired Karen Yeates, who is now executive vice president-information technologies. Karen was Michelle’s right hand and living in California, and she decided she was going to move to the East Coast.

Michelle ended up keeping her on in her technology position remotely. So Karen was on the East Coast before we really had any members on the East Coast. Karen created the technology that we have today, which I think is by far the best technology in the industry.

Just to give you some benchmarks from a revenue perspective, when Michelle was hired 23 years ago, Signature members were doing a combined $30 million in total travel sales. When Ignacio was hired we were probably at just over $1 billion and now we’ll do almost $6 billion this year. Signature has grown exponentially.

TP: What kind of travel do Signature agents book?

AS: Traditionally in Southern California it was Princess Cruises, it was Mexico and it was Hawaii. That’s how Signature was born. We’ve really evolved. We’re still predominately selling premium deluxe and a lot of luxury. That’s certainly where the greatest growth is right now.

Land in the last couple of years has been outpacing our cruise growth. But both are healthy.

If you look at just the four major luxury cruise lines,  Seabourn, Silversea, Crystal and Regent, they represent less than 3 percent of the ocean-going cruise capacity and 20 percent of our overall sales.

Hotel sales have grown faster than everything over the last two years. I think the hotel business has come back stronger than other segments coming out of the recession. It probably got hit harder and came back stronger. We have 800 luxury hotels in our hotel program and we’re really seeing our members embrace the program.

TP: What’s new at Signature for 2014?

AS: I would say the most important thing is this notion of engagement. In the early years, Michelle knew every member. She had lunch with them on a regular basis, she knew their kids, and she knew why they sold Classic over Pleasant or vice versa. She knew everything about them.

As we grew, that became more and more difficult. Where our focus has changed is how we engage the member. With only 200 members, we need to know everything about them. We need to know if they do groups really well and if so how and why. Is there a huge family market? Are they marketing enough?

What we’ve done is we hired Kimberly Waters late last year as our vice president of sales and member engagement. If we get a dozen or less members a year, good quality members, that’s a great year. That’s like some of these other guys adding 100.

When we bring in a new member it’s a group effort. It’s not one sales person. There’s not a new member I haven’t met and talked to. And they talk to Ignacio about the hotel program and public relations. They talk to Karen about technology.

We also hired Shannon Garrett. She’s the first person in our member engagement department. She’s calling our members and asking how can we serve you, what can we do for you.  The mission is that each one of our members has to grow and we’re going to help them.

TP: How was business last year?

AS: It was good. We had high single digit growth overall, which I think is strong. We saw the strongest growth in the hotel segment followed by tour, followed by cruise. We hit a few home runs for sure, on the cruise side and several on the tour side.

This year looks to be more of the same. It’s not easy. I think for the last several years travel agents have been cautiously optimistic.

As I said before, luxury is growing quicker than the other segments and then some of the niches have done very well for us, particularly family. Just this year we’re really getting behind the active adventure space in much more proactive ways.

TP: What are the benefits of a co-op versus a consortium?

AS: With a consortium you’re going to pay to be a member and you’re going to pay for marketing. At Signature each member owns one share. We’re technically a not for profit, so everything is distributed equally to every member of our cooperative based on their contribution of preferred sales. 

We’ve been very effective helping our current members grow. When they plug into our marketing and technology they see some great returns early on and then steady growth beyond that.