VOICE OF LUXURY


VOICE LUXURY


Ů Lisa Fitzell


managing director, Elegant Resorts


Adding value in a challenging year is paying off for Elegant, hears Erica Bush


Q. How have sales been so far this year?


It’s been challenging – nobody can say it’s been an amazing year. We’ve had fantastic months and we’ve had terrible months, so it’s been a real roller-coaster. Overall, we’re at 5% growth for the year across the company.


Q. How important is the trade to Elegant Resorts?


I really believe in agents and supporting them to be the very best. At the moment, trade sales make up about 25% of our business, so it’s quite small, but we haven’t had a really strong, active drive for quite a few years. We’ve brought in Jon [Hardcastle, head of agency sales, who joined earlier this year from ITC], who’s really well-known and respected in the trade. And we’ve identified the best people in our sales team for dealing with agents, so we now have a dedicated agency team.


Q. What other tools do you have to support agents?


We’ve just launched our new magazine and in November, we’ll have a print version for agents. We’re also going to have a digital one that we can white-label for some of our top partners. We’ve brought back brochures and we have agent versions of those too. We’ve got Beach & Beyond, which is all about luxury beaches, but with experiences and itineraries


thrown in; and Family Adventures, which is a selection of luxury beaches for families with exclusive offers for Elegant clients and our agents. In early October, we’ll have our first tailor-made and touring brochure. We’ve also increased the number of fam trips from two a year to five.


Q. Which destinations are selling well?


Europe started off terribly but actually we’ll have growth this year which, considering Brexit and exchange rates, is pretty good. We’ve had a particularly good season for Italy and the Balearic Islands. We’ve got growth in the Caribbean, where we’ve put a lot of emphasis on developing the smaller islands. It’s our homeland and it’s where we started, so it’s really important to us. We’ve also had significant growth


ª


aspiretravelclub.co.uk


SEPTEMBER 2019 ASPIRE 95


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