• New Dates for IPW 2021: The U.S. Travel Association has announced that IPW, its annual international inbound travel trade show that was canceled this year, will be a live, in-person event held in Las Vegas from September 18-22, 2021. The September dates are revised from previously released 2021 event dates. US Travel, together with premier sponsor Brand USA and our hosts, the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority and Travel Nevada, secured later dates to provide additional time for international long-haul travel to the United States to broadly resume. U.S. Travel plans to open registration for IPW exhibitors in mid-November. IPW buyer and media registration will open in early 2021. IPW 2021 will be held in the newly constructed West Hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center. Planning for IPW show floor and media marketplace activities, as well as related official events, is underway by the IPW Host Committee.

• Corporate Travel Management buys U.S. rival Travel and Transport: Australia based Corporate Travel Management is acquiring Nebraska-based TMC Travel and Transport, along with the Radius Travel Network business for more than $274 million. The company says that the move will give it a formidable presence in the U.S. market and beyond with the new merged entity generating more than $8.5 billion in sales. It also gives it a larger foothold in the UK, Germany and France.

T&T’s executive team will integrate with CTM and Kevin O’Malley becomes CEO of North America. “We are excited to bring our two companies together under the CTM umbrella,” said CTM founder and managing director Jamie Pherous. One consequence The Travel and Transport name will eventually disappear and be absorbed into CTM, Radius Travel comprises a network of corporate travel agencies in more than 100 countries.

• HolidayTaxis signs an agreement to become a transfer provider to newly launched OTA Thomas Cook. ”On behalf of the entire team here at HolidayTaxis Group, we are thrilled to have been selected to support the re-launch of this iconic travel brand” said HolidayTaxis Group CEO Ian Coyle, adding, “In these challenging times that our entire industry is facing right now, HolidayTaxis’ proven ability to deliver customer satisfaction to our global partner network—combined with our Covid-19 related protection protocols, partnership support and efficient API connectivity—will enable Thomas Cook to switch product and destination focus as it chooses, in line with government and market forces that influence our industry booking patterns.” David Scott, Thomas Cook head of ancillaries and financial services, said: ‘It’s important to us that our customers have choice and flexibility, plus feel safe and secure when arriving or heading home from holiday.

• TUI Destination Experiences morphs into TUI Musement: A brand new brand to be known as TUI Musement has been established in order to accelerate the transformation and growth of the European travel group’s tours and activities businesses. Previously known as TUI Destination Experiences, the new unit will feature a digital platform-plus model combining a scalable online platform for sourcing, producing and distributing tours and activities in more than 50 countries worldwide. Newly integrated teams will focus on specialist areas, such as business development and supply management, enabling Tui Musement to combine and capitalize on the existing expertise, according to TUI Group.

Executive board member Sebastian Ebel said: “With these changes we start a new exciting phase of our growth story. “We are developing a global tours and activities leader, which will be in a dominant market position once tours and activities returns to growth.” TUI Musement offers more than 130,000 “things to do” in holiday and city destinations worldwide and is expanding its offering by connecting new suppliers. The inventory is distributed to all 21 million Tui customers, through B2B partnerships – such as a recent strategic partnership with Booking.com – and B2C through the Musement and TUI websites.

TUI Musement chief executive David Schelp said: “Musement has been a key driver of our overall growth strategy since the acquisition in 2018.” (TUI acquired Musement two years ago from Hotelbeds for $136 million.) • Hotelbeds partners with DMC NexusTours, Thomas Cook:Destination management company NexusTours has inked a strategic partnership with global bank Hotelbeds. NexusTours will become the preferred provider for transfers, local assistance and tours and experiences in Mexico and the Dominican Republic. It gets access to Hotelbeds’ 60,000-plus travel trade buyers including tour operators, airlines, and retail travel agencies. NexusTours’ recently launched its Concierge Service which will be available to Hotelbeds’ travel partners.

Meanwhile, Hotelbeds has inked a strategic partnership with recently re-established brand Thomas Cook. (See article above on Thomas Cook’s new relationship with HolidayTaxis Group.) The move with provide Thomas Cook’s new online-only holiday business with access to over 180,000 unique hotels in 140 countries via Hotelbeds. At the same time, Thomas Cook becomes one of Hotelbeds’ 60,000-plus travel trade buyers, which include tour operators, travel agents and airlines. “All of us at Hotelbeds are immensely pleased to see Thomas Cook relaunching and we’re delighted to be able to support their new model.  We look forward to watching it grow once again into one of Europe’s leading holiday brands,” said Leon Herce, global sales director at Hotelbeds. Thomas Cook just recently re-established itself as an OTA under owner Fosun Tourism Group, which is also the parent company of Club Med.

Necessity—the mother of invention for the Travel Trade: In reviewing the daily and weekly news, of late, that cover new developments among international tour operators, USA-based receptive tour operators and, in general, the distribution system that promotes and sells the Visit USA travel experience abroad, one suspects that the industry has always had at its core some really inventive and resourceful people who are constantly devising new ways for travelers to enjoy the experience. And for travel sellers who market the experience. For the most part, these innovators keep their ideas to themselves, maybe discussing them with some like-minded professionals elsewhere in the travel and tourism industry until … it’s necessary to try something different.

Such is the case as the industry tries to reckon with the shadow of the coronavirus-driven global pandemic. Local, regional and international in nature, there follows a sampler of what is going on in the industry of late.

• UK-based senior traveler specialists Saga Holidays has introduced a “Stay & Discover” range within its 2021 program, allowing customers to tour an area form a single hotel base. A total of 42 new holidays have been added for 2021, with the operator producing its first brochures since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. “Stay and Discover” features the Saga Reassurance Promise, which includes travel insurance with coronavirus cover and extra cancellation rights, no amendment fees and a £99 ($126) deposit. The operator has also reintroduced its Price Promise to guarantee best prices for early bookers. Chris Simmonds, managing director of Saga Holidays said: “We’re really excited to finally launch our new 2021 holiday brochures and the wealth of new holidays including Stay & Discover which offer guests the opportunity to immerse themselves in the destinations while enjoying the comfort of the hotel as a single base.”

• In Germany, in a development that seems to have surprised the traditional distribution system and the way it conducts business, “more and more travel agencies want to introduce a fee for additional services,” reports the German travel trade publication Touristik Aktuell. The coronavirus crisis and its dramatic consequences for the entire travel industry have increased the willingness of many travel agency owners to introduce a flat-rate service. More than half of the participants surveyed in a recent webinar indicated that they wanted to charge a flat rate in the future. Almost 60 travel experts took part in the survey. The webinar was led by Wibke Rissling-Erdbrügge from the training institute WRE Training.

• Hoteliers and operators are adapting to increasing number of travelers traveling to “close-in” destinations. The recent edition of Duetto’s Pulse Report, which tracks key hotel business metrics from Aug. 24-Sept. 6, showed significant increases in performance for the hotel markets of North America, bolstered by the Labor Day holiday weekend. Reported businesswire.com, “This is the first true boost to hotel performance since the COVID-19 pandemic took hold and is a breath of fresh air for what have been highly restricted markets, which will continue to wax and wane in the months ahead.” 

“Our data shows us, from hotels across the nation, people are willing to spend longer hours in the car than ever before to arrive at a destination of leisure,” said David Woolenberg, CEO of Duetto. Overall trends in North American hotel bookings over Labor Day, in comparison with the prior 14 weeks, showed the following:

—Traditional drive-to markets saw positive increases in new bookings as well as an increase in demand, which indicates our drive radius has increased in search of leisure. For example, Colorado saw a 432 percent increase; Tennessee (excluding Nashville) a 439 percent increase; Louisiana a 590 percent increase; Nevada a 272 percent increase; California increased 283 percent; and Florida increased 189 percent.

—Remote and rural locations are often being favored over urban destinations. (Colorado, Tennessee, Nevada)

—Travelers are willing to drive further distances in lieu of air travel. (Louisiana, California)

—New York City saw its largest uptick in net new bookings, up 318, over the prior 14 weeks. Although well below 2019 numbers, these numbers show a positive response to some restrictions lifting and lowered COVID rates.

Said businesswire, “Remote and rural locations fared very well over the Labor Day weekend, some with bookings rivaling or surpassing 2019. One innovative hotel brand and Duetto customer specializing in luxury airstream experiences, AutoCamp, saw bookings up 37 percent from Labor Day 2019 at its Yosemite property

• The global tour operator Intrepid Travel, which specializes in small group adventure travel, says it has seen unprecedented demand for family tours over the last several months, prompting the company to create new retreat-style tours geared towards the demographic, with safety and quality as top priorities. Intrepid has found that a quarter of the top 25 itineraries booked by its customers globally over the past three months have been family-themed tours, compared to just 12 percent during the same period last year, indicating a desire for families to go abroad in 2021 after months spent distancing. Currently, the top family trips booked globally are all based in Africa and Asia, including the South Africa Family Safari with Teenagers and a family tour of Vietnam, while North American families are also interested in adventures in the Middle East, particularly Jordan and Egypt. The four new Family Retreats, based in Morocco, Turkey and England, will have groups immerse themselves in one location in handpicked accommodation with nearby experiences.

“After months spent indoors away from friends and classmates, we’ve seen families are eager to get out and explore the world once it is safe to do so, and have a desire to reconnect with both nature and like-minded people,” said Dyan Mackie, Intrepid’s family product manager.

• The Toronto-headquartered global tour operator G Adventures is branching out from global tour products to day tours, giving people the opportunity to get a taste of small group travel while remaining close to home. Its new “One Day in Boston: Sunrise to Sunset” local experience has been designed to offer a small, physically-distanced group of 16 people a day out in Boston. The day tour includes an early morning outdoor yoga session in the Common, a guided walk along the Black Heritage Trail, a bike tour into Cambridge, a three-hour food and history lesson through Chinatown and ends with a sunset sail on a classic schooner.

The city tours may be rolled out to other cities depending on demand. As reported by TravelMarketReport.com, Steve Lima, director of marketing for the U.S., says the small group operator wants to give people the opportunity to find adventure in their own backyard. The One Day in Boston: Sunrise to Sunset tour is priced from $259 per person for a full-day guided day tour, starting at 7:30am. It runs on Saturday Sept. 26 and Saturday Oct. 3, 2020. The tour is commissionable for travel advisors. Meanwhile, as the coronavirus-driven pandemic continues to create global uncertainty, G Adventures has suspended tours through Oct. 31, 2020, as well as the November and December departures of its G Expedition ship, with the exception of a small selection of tours departing in Europe in September and October where travel is possible between certain countries.

TW’s 2020 Power List tells us that it was a very good year. Now for the sequel.

      

Travel Weekly’s annual Power List of travel agencies is more than just a list of the agencies that had $100 million and more (much more, in some cases) in sales the previous year. The profiles and capsule recaps of significant activity on the part of each company help us understand the importance of the distribution system to the tour and travel industry and to the latter’s contribution to the U.S. economy.

This year’s 2020 Power List of the 52 companies that made the cut will serve as a benchmark against which the industry can measure its progress once it starts to claw its way back to health and productivity. For the record, this year’s list told us that the Expedia Group (its brands include Expedia.com, Hotels.com, Hotwire, Orbitz, Travelocity and Trivago, among others) cracked the $100 billion threshold in sales last year—$107.9 billion, to be precise; it tallied $99 billion the previous year. Number 2, Booking Holdings (Booking.com, Priceline, Agoda, Kayak, Open Table and more) registered $96.4 billion—up from $92.7 billion.

The Top Ten on the Travel Weekly 2020 Power List generated a total of $332.5 billion in sales, an increase of 5 percent over the previous year’s Top Ten total sales of $317.3 billion. Look for numbers like these to populate the analyses that economists will use to measure the progress of our emergence from this year’s dark days.

As Travel Weekly put it: “In the year before the coronavirus pandemic, there was actually a whole lot of good news for the travel companies that reported their 2019 results for inclusion in the 2020 Travel Weekly Power List, our annual ranking of companies with $100 million or more in travel sales in the previous calendar year. Many of these agencies had expanded their sales volume, with some making acquisitions, bulking up staff and investing in new technology,” adding, “All of that investment may prove useful as the industry emerges from a punishing shutdown.”

INBOUND has reformatted some of the basics from the 2020 Power List in the following charts.

TW’s Note on Methodology: To qualify for the 2020 Power List, a company had to have a minimum of $100 million in travel sales in 2019. For purposes of this survey, sales are defined as gross sales of travel products worldwide, whether to consumers or to corporate travelers; the company must be the merchant of record on the transaction from a supplier’s perspective. At least 15 percent of the sales volume must have been generated in the U.S.

The questionnaire was sent in February to companies that had appeared on the list in previous years; had contacted Travel Weekly believing they qualified; or had been in the news because of acquisitions or had grown for other reasons.

As has been the case for years, Travel Weekly requested that gross sales volume be certified by a company’s owner, CEO or CFO. In a small number of cases, certification was made by an executive at the vice president level but with financial oversight.

Some companies that may have qualified opted not to participate; see our introduction as well as “A note on Booking Holdings.” (Above) While all cooperating listees did certify sales (or made them public), it must be kept in mind that even those numbers are difficult to verify because the great majority of travel sellers are privately held and under no obligation to disclose financial data.

For the complete account of the Power List article in Travel Weekly, click here.