Executives of The Travel Corporation (TTC) stopped by recently to update us on their new New York office, which will be overseen by Guy Young, the former president of Uniworld Boutique River Cruise Collection.
Besides opening the new office, The Travel Corporation, owner of such brands as Uniworld, African Travel, Insight Vacations, Luxury Gold, Trafalgar and Red Carnation Hotels is also in the process of hiring 18 sales associates across its brands to cover the East Coast travel advisor market.
“This represents a huge commitment on our part; the company is really putting its money where its mouth is,” Richard Launder, president of The Travel Corporation, told us.
The move comes as TTC seeks to establish itself more with advisors east of the Mississippi. The company, headquartered in Anaheim, CA, had gotten feedback from its various travel agent advisory boards that they considered TTC more of a West Coast-centric company.
“As a company, we know that one of the major pillars to the success of our different brands are the relationships we have with our travel agent partners. We also realize that over the last several years we have under serviced our travel agent partners in the east," Young told us. “This was by no means intentional. It’s just the way our company evolved over time with more and more of our executives and call center operations moving out west. Not only are we opening an office in New York, we are also hiring 18 new sales managers to better support our agency partners on the east coast. This is a great vote of confidence in the travel agent distribution model.”
In other moves to support the travel agent market, TTC (in conjunction with Questex, parent company of Travel Agent Central) has launched the TTC Agent Academy for travel agents, a single learning platform for Trafalgar, Contiki, Insight Vacations and Uniworld via a series of interactive modules, which will be periodically updated.
Launder told us that TTC has also for the first time united all of its brands under one CRM, using Salesforce, making it possible to have a single view of its customers across the board.
The Travel Corporation started the year out strongly, said Launder, noting that the second week of January was the best they’ve had in 13 years. He noted that causes could be the strength of the U.S. dollar as well as the financial markets, strong airlift and current offers in the marketplace. “Our call volume doubled,” he said.