More than 1,300 travel advisors attended the Ascend 2024 conference in Cancun in October to hear the latest about ALG Vacations, including its expansion plans in Europe. Tours editor Tom Stieghorst spoke with Ray Snisky, group president of the Hyatt-owned packaged vacation operator, to see what’s new for 2025.
Ray Snisky
Q: Hyatt recently acquired Mr. & Mrs. Smith and made a World of Hyatt marketing alliance with Under Canvas. What are they?
A: Mr. & Mrs. Smith is an OTA in the U.K. that has a collection of boutique hotels. Under Canvas is glamping. Both of these products add more appealing content for Luxe by ALGV, which we launched earlier this year.
Q: One of your goals for 2025 is to improve the rail-booking experience in Europe. What needs to be done?
A: With the airlines, with GDSs, there’s a very efficient way for us to source inventory electronically. And rail doesn’t have a mature distribution strategy, something like that. We’re assessing the best way to do it. There are a number of companies that still do it very manually. So we’re trying to avoid that.
The key for Europe is to be able to transact multi-destination travel, and rail is a component of that — it’s really essential. I like to think our focus with travel advisors is to make vacations easy. So our focus is to come up with a solution that works very, very well. And looking to simplify it for those advisors, as well.
Q: Your company has historically been, in transportation, a point-to-point company. Is providing multicity itineraries a transition for ALG Vacations?
A: We do that today. We’re a leader in travel to Hawaii, where a larger percentage of the customers do multistops, going to different islands. So we have that technology, that platform, but there’s more that we can do to enhance it, bring more sophistication. For example, bringing intra-Europe airline systems into it. We’re really looking at trying to make complex vacation itineraries much simpler and easier. So this is definitely an emphasis going into next year.
Q: At the conference, you talked about how the airlines have changed their revenue strategy to put more value on the quality of the customer rather than the quantity. How does that change affect the business model at ALG?
A: It’s across the entire industry; the amount of revenue management today versus where it was even five or 10 years ago is dramatically different. It’s all about trying to optimize yield on their inventory. For us as intermediaries, we have to add value. One way is to bring customers airlines may not have access to on their own. Another is trying to maximize the quality of the customer.
Q: Does that imply you need a different type of customer?
A: Yes, I think that’s the case. I think you’re seeing us transition the business a bit. We had historically been the upper end of Middle America, and, yes, it was providing value products to fill seats on planes or hotel rooms. And that still remains true.
How the wholesale business was originally designed — and elements of it remain true today — is we give [the airlines] a great piece of business in advance, well outside of their own booking curves, and allow them to [build] yield off of that inventory by us having this opaquely priced product out in the marketplace. That still remains true today. We’re just trying to see if we can continue to find better customers, within those elements, as well.
