Avoya Travel’s Million Dollar Showcase highlights the ‘elite’

ORLANDO — Luxury travel was firmly on the minds of the attendees of Avoya Travel’s Million Dollar Showcase being held this week at the Waldorf Astoria here.

All 81 travel advisors in attendance — in Avoya parlance, Independent Agencies, or IAs — are on track to make at least $1 million in gross sales this year.

The event, in its second year, is “all about raising the bar,” Avoya’s Mickey McBride, vice president of partnerships, said on stage Tuesday morning. “This group is truly elite.”

The advisors were joined by 43 supplier partners with whom one-on-one appointments were set to take place Tuesday and Wednesday.

“It’s all about raising the bar, learning, connecting and enhancing,” McBride said.

The art of selling luxury

Several veteran advisors discussed the art of selling luxury travel during a panel Tuesday afternoon.

“You have to be very detail oriented,” said Penny Rushing, co-owner of Four Points Travel in Apollo Beach, Fla. “The luxury market, the clients that I have, they are down to nitty-gritty, nitpicky things. Which is fine, they’re paying for it, but I think as an advisor you need to be detail oriented and very organized.”

“And listen,” added Avis Leeper, owner of Avis Keown Leeper Agency in Charlotte.

Oftentimes what the client is saying and what they actually want don’t match up, she said.

But one of their biggest pieces of advice was resounding: Experience the product.

That’s how Robyn Jacobs, owner of Orca Travel in Dallas, moved into luxury sales. She went on an AmaWaterways river cruise in 2018 and was hooked.

She encouraged other agents to experience products and understand them well, because luxury clients want to see that their advisors have depth of knowledge.

Leeper agreed. 

“Learn the product. Try the product,” she said. “Because that’s the best seller.”

What’s new? What’s hot?

During a panel Tuesday morning, four cruise line representatives shared the latest consumer behavior and market trends they’ve been seeing.

Marilyn Conroy, executive vice president of sales and marketing at Riviera River Cruises, said one of the fastest growing segments of travelers are singles. She shared a statistic that 60% of the population over the age of 65 are single, “either by design or circumstance,” and they want to travel.

To meet that demand, Riviera has 40 departures this year and next just for solo travelers, Conroy said. Those sailings do not carry single supplements.

Travelers are also increasingly looking for more immersive travel. With a river cruise, she said, that’s an easy demand to meet: “You sail right into the city or the village that you’re going to be touring, so you’re in the heart of it.”

Private destinations are all the rage for Royal Caribbean, according to Brittany Yochum, manager of national accounts. She said consumers are increasingly gravitating toward more controlled environments than before the pandemic, so private destinations like Royal’s Perfect Day at Coco Cay are taking off in popularity.

“It’s actually our highest-rated destination of the 300 destinations we sail to across the globe,” Yochum said.

Royal is putting its money behind that trend, too. The cruise line is developing new private destinations in the Bahamas and Mexico. Each will be dubbed Royal Beach Club, with Nassau’s opening next year and Cozumel’s in 2026.

Those, Yochum said, will offer experienced cruisers who have been to those destinations multiple times something new to do.

Expedition travel is an “up-and-coming” market, said Becky Helms, regional sales director for Lindblad Expeditions. Lindblad operates on all seven continents. 

A particularly hot destination right now is Antarctica, she said. The cruise line will have four ships sailing there in the coming years to meet that demand. Lindblad also offers cruisers the option to fly over the Drake Passage if they’re nervous about its potentially rough seas.

Lisa Gourdine, director of sales for Paul Gauguin Cruises, had less to offer regarding trends, especially considering Paul Gauguin is a one-ship, one-destination cruise line sailing the South Pacific. But she did have an ask of the travel advisors present.

“People do not know geography as well, so we need you, the travel advisors, just to remind people where Tahiti is, that it is just an eight-hour flight from Los Angeles,” Gourdine said. “It’s a direct flight. It’s not halfway around the world.

The importance of storytelling

Storytelling is an important part of luxury brand marketing. Four cruise line representatives tackled the topic, and resources for advisors, during a panel Tuesday afternoon.

For Silversea Cruises, storytelling is a big part of the brand’s strategy to reach consumers, said Cindy Litzie, area sales director. For instance, the cruise line’s current marketing campaign is “To The Curious,” sharing destinations consumers might not have known they could reach via ship. 

Litzie said advisors have access to resources, including short videos, to help paint a picture of the Silversea experience for their clients.

True stories told with raw emotion are often the most impactful, said Kayla Corbett, director of key and national accounts with Scenic Group.

She offered one of her own as an example, from a recent trip to Antarctica.

“It was the best Saturday of my life,” Corbett said. “When I got off the ship there were humpback whales in the bay; and smelling the penguin colonies, hearing some of the chatter. Once we reached the summit on Petermann Island, you could hear the whales singing in the bay below, and the sun was glistening off the ice. What better place on earth to be that Saturday than in Antarctica?”

In a study Scenic did, she added, personal testimonials were found to be the No. 1 source of lead generation for luxury travel.

David Schoenberg, regional sales director for Ponant, shared a story of an advisor who joined the cruise line on a recent Antarctica sailing. She had never sailed with Ponant before.

Throughout the trip, she took video snippets of the experience. Every day she focused on a different subject or spot on the ship, Schoenberg said. She shared those videos on her Facebook page.

Within two and a half weeks of the cruise’s end, she sold three cabins.

Explora Journeys was in a rather unique position until recently: The company was selling just a story for two years before its first ship hit the water last summer, said Kaitlin Krueger, business relationship expert.

But that narrative has shifted in the past year, enabling the cruise line to tell “real, tangible stories.”

Many of those have come from advisors, she said, which she called “absolutely fabulous.”