VOICE OF LUXURY
Lefay Resort & Spa Dolomiti, Italy
Lisa (left) with If Only’s Tracy Docherty (right) and Designer Travel agents
Q. Beyond the extended sales team and social media groups, what tools are you offering to support the trade? We’ve been taking our destination specialists out on the road. We have an absolutely incredible amount of knowledge in the team and we’re ensuring those people are on hand to help agents make bookings. We’ve been hosting lots of networking events. For Elegant Resorts, we’ve already hosted 12 coffee mornings for homeworkers and have eight more planned and we’ve held seven supplier lunches and dinners, with 13 more planned. We have also increased our fam trip numbers and we’ll do five this year for Elegant, whereas pre-pandemic we’d do two or three. For If Only, we have our top agent and homeworkers VIP clubs where they get extra benefits, and we’re also introducing our If Only By Appointment videoconferencing service this month to support agents to get high-value bookings confirmed with the help of our specialists. We’re also increasing fam trips from five or six a year to eight.
Q. What’s new for Elegant’s product offering this year? We’ve got a new wellness brochure which we’ve worked hard to curate. It features 32 specialised wellness properties including
Chenot Palace, Lefay, Chiva Som and Sha Wellness. This will be bookable by the trade, and they can use the skills of four of our team members who have spent six months training on this product to become our wellness specialists. We expanded our product offering in 2021 and we are now seeing more being added into the portfolio than ever before. We’ve added 40 hotels so far this year, and I expect we’ll reach 80 new hotels this year. We’ve also already added 20 new itineraries.
Q. And what’s new at If Only? We’ve just launched our inaugural European beach programme, with 106 five-star hotels in the Mediterranean, and we’ve also expanded our luxury cruise collection to feature 22 lines, with European and river cruise itineraries featured for the first time. We also joined Clia to further support this. We are doing more in Africa; we introduced our first dedicated offering to South Africa and we’ll be doing more across the continent from October. We have increased our headcount by 30% and now have more staff than we did pre-pandemic. But we aren’t some big machine, and I love that there’s a family atmosphere to the brand.
aspiretravelclub.co.uk
JUNE 2023 ASPIRE
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