VOICE OF LUXURY
Das Edelweiss Salzburg Mountain Resort
Al Habtoor Palace, Budapest
After seeing this excitement, more hotels and destinations are really getting creative by hosting pop-up events and creating experiences for guests with celebrity chefs or artists. We’ve also started to see a trend of travellers doing twin-centre stays at Preferred properties in town and country, which is exciting.
Q. Tell us more about the business’s sustainability efforts. We launched our Beyond Green collection in 2021 to highlight properties that are true leaders in sustainability and focused on the core pillars of nature, community and culture. We have since grown the portfolio to more than 50 members and are focusing on developing the brand to bring city hotels into the fold. We hosted our first-ever Beyond Green Summit at Cavallo Point, one of our Legend Collection properties, in California in March. We also recently launched our Climate Action Plan, which is in line with the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals, to assess what we can do at a company level. We partnered with the Travel Foundation to do a baseline study on our carbon emissions and implement systems to help manage them. We’ve also started sessions to educate our teams on how to have an impact.
Q. How are you striving to strengthen relationships with the travel trade? The trade has always been super important and the UK is a huge market for us, so we’ve grown our team to reflect this. We recently appointed Dan Clark as vice-president of global leisure sales for Europe to strengthen relationships with the travel agent community, drive bookings for member hotels worldwide and foster partnerships with luxury organisations such as Virtuoso and Serandipians. The group sales team now has two salespeople as well as two support team members. Our sales approach has evolved over the years too. We’re focused on connecting people through hosting experiences with advisors to have fun and learn from each other. Our measurement of success is still bookings but we’re thinking about how we motivate agents through listening to what they want. We have also launched our Travel Advisor Portal, which has received great feedback. In the first two weeks, 777 agents enrolled. We built it because our VIP desk was inundated with requests for information, quotes and commissions, so we thought let’s create a way for advisors to access all of that in one place and make bookings easier.
aspiretravelclub.co.uk
MARCH 2025 ASPIRE
97
CREDITS: Georg Roske; Daniel Herendi
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