Two Global Travel Collection agencies, In the Know Experiences and Nicer, have formed a joint venture. Nicer has taken a 50% stake in In the Know Experiences, which is benefitting from Nicer’s technology platform and its development of travel advisors who are new to the industry.
Global Travel Collection is the luxury division of Internova Travel Group (No. 11 on Travel Weekly’s Power List).
The core of Nicer, an agency founded last year, is its technology platform, which was designed to create efficiencies in advisor workflow.
As part of the joint venture, In the Know advisors will have access to Nicer’s platform at no charge, according to Angie Licea, Global Travel Collection’s CEO. Nicer will be tasked with recruiting advisors who are new to the industry, onboarding them and training them using Global Travel Collection’s learning-management system and training resources. Once new advisors hit $2 million in sales, Licea said, they will move over to an affiliation with In the Know, which will continue to focus its own recruitment efforts on more seasoned advisors.
Licea said the joint venture explores this question: “If we take these two pieces — the progressive advisor and this technology that’s enabling a different way of selling — and put them together, what could we do?”
She said use of Nicer’s platform will be optional for In the Know advisors, but she added that excitement was high when she shared the news with advisors.
“I would be very surprised if the majority don’t use the technology,” she said. The holdouts would be In the Know’s few heavy GDS users.
Keeping Nicer’s focus on new advisors makes sense, according to Nicer co-founder and CEO Ragan Stone. Much of Nicer’s growth has come from new advisors. Stone said these advisors can be onboarded and make their first booking within 24 to 48 hours.
“We want to have a space for new-to-industry advisors to come in and grow and be able to develop their business,” Stone said. And she wants to do it in a way that lets them “hit the ground running.”
Nicer’s platform was designed to be easy to use for new advisors — or for assistants hired by experienced advisors to help with their workload.
And the platform has been evolving since it was introduced. It connects consumers and advisors via an app — in addition to acting as a lead generator and attracting consumers who haven’t worked with advisors, advisors can add existing clients to the app. Consumers, who make profiles for themselves on the app, have access to several features, including the ability to chat with their advisor, comment on components of a trip and make payments.
For advisors, Nicer includes a booking engine for hotels and air. It is working on adding tour booking as well as inventory from wholesalers.
It also includes an itinerary builder with integrated payment management; learning modules, which include AI to help answer advisors’ questions; and CRM features that enable storage of traveler notes and past itineraries.
AI features in the itinerary builder are deployed for tasks like writing descriptions of things like tours and hotels. With the click of a button, the AI will generate content for advisors in a tone that has been honed to be “reflective of that next-gen clientele and advisor,” Stone said.
Nicer plans to funnel a lot of investment into marketing the Nicer app as a way for consumers to connect with advisors to increase its lead-generation pipeline, Stone said. More AI features are coming, too, like itinerary generation that is as vague or as detailed as an advisor wants. Nicer will also implement AI suggestions of things to do when there’s free time, like coffee shops on a walking route from one activity to another.
The use of AI is designed to augment advisors’ workflow and save them time, Stone said.
“Small implementations of AI are the implementations where we get the highest utilization, and we find that advisors get the biggest return on that right now,” she said.
