The VIPs
Catering for ‘very important passengers’ is a specialised business that requires a lot more than personal service
By BOB PAPWORTH
To the police, it stands for ‘victim identification profile’; to the medical frater- nity, it’s ‘vasoactive intestinal peptide’; to a very small group of highly specialised nerds, it stands for ‘vortex intermeshing pin’. No, no idea – google it, and you’ll still have no idea. To the corporate travel industry, however, ‘VIP’ stands for one thing, and one thing alone. As we all know, it stands for ‘someone with a travel budget the size of Jupiter who needs to be handled with the very softest of kid gloves’. Since ‘SWATBTSOJWNTOBHWTV-
SOKG’ doesn’t exactly trip off the tongue, they’re known as VIPs, or ‘very important passengers’. They differ from CIPs (‘com- mercially important passengers’) who are people who might do you some sort of contra-deal in return for an upgrade. There is no way to upgrade a VIP, because they’re already upgraded to the hilt. All VIPs, by definition, are CIPs. They have, or have access to, big budgets. By and
large, they fall into two categories – those who are genuinely important, like the heads of a major global corporations, and those who have enough money and ego to think they’re important, like supermodels and ‘celebrity’ television presenters. The latter are VIPs only as far as sup- pliers are concerned; the former are VIPs – what one might call CWHs, or ‘clients worth having’ – as far as corporate travel management companies are concerned.
Only 15 or so of BBT’s Top 50 TMCs actu- ally identify top-end travel as one of the additional services they offer, but it’s a fair bet that most of them do so as a matter of course, and therefore don’t consider it to be an ‘additional’ offering. HRG makes a point of spelling it out, even though global travel services director Ian Windsor openly admits there is no real definition of VIP. “Every organisation has its own version,” he says. “If you are at a certain level within your company, you are deemed to be a VIP, but there are VVIPs and possibly VVVIPs up there as well.
“They’re usually those at main board level, or strategically important people, but the VIP category also includes travellers who make a great many trips – they’re very frequent travellers for a reason. What they all have in common is a need and demand for an absolutely seamless travel experience, at all stages of the journey.” In short, they don’t queue for shuttle buses, they don’t push their own wobbly- wheeled luggage trolleys, they don’t kill time in Starbucks, and they only turn right on an aircraft if it’s a private jet. Seat 39B is a dim-and-distant memory. Jay Taylor, Hillgate Travel’s VIP and pres-
tige sales and account manager, is now in his 16th year in the industry, much of which has involved dealing with high net-worth individuals (HNWIs). He says: “There are various different ways of defining them, but I would suggest that a VIP is simply someone of great influence,” he says. “Celebrities influence the public, while others influence our corporate clients – they’re the company presidents, chief executives and managing directors of this world. They might not necessarily follow
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