a different kind of loyalty program

A major online booking platform for hotels, flights, and unverified vacation rentals just announced a loyalty program. They also announced that they’re going to use A.I. to help people plan personalized travel. The CEO of this big conglomerate was actually on a morning show today talking about how it’s a great thing for travelers that they’re going to let robots book you into potentially unsafe accommodations, while not providing live human support for your travel bookings!

Sweet lord child.

Well, we’ve got a loyalty program, too. It’s not the kind of program where our clients earn miles or points when they book with us (though, of course, most of the fares we book for you will earn you do earn those frequent flyer miles and hotel program loyalty points). Rather, we’re talking about a different kind of loyalty program.

We’re loyal to our clients.

We take the time to actually have conversations with our clients about the trips we plan. We listen to you when you tell us what you want, and what you don’t like. In a day and age when travel is complicated and flights and hotels are overbooked, we’ve got resources to find options and alternatives. We actively solicit your feedback about your travels with our supplier partners, so that we can run interference if something goes sideways.

Our professional association asked Chat GPT to write an article about why people should use a travel advisor instead of artificial intelligence to plan travel. Check out the results. In this case, we think they were on-the-nose.

We’re loyal to our supplier network.

If you’ve been following us on social media, you know that we’ve been traveling a lot in recent months. That’s because we invest a lot in our networks of preferred suppliers. We build those relationships with hotels, resorts, cruise lines and tour operators, so that when we book our clients with them, we know that the quality of experience is there. We take a long hard look at their sustainability practices before we decide to recommend them. We develop contracts with travel and tourism board and convention and visitors bureaus, so that we can get up-to-date information about destinations where our clients travel, around the world.

And we take meetings — lots and lots of meetings.

We’re part of a couple of networks — Uniglobe Travel Center and Virtuoso. Each of those networks gives us mature relationships with suppliers we know we can trust. Next month, half of our team will be at Virtuoso Travel Week, where we will, between three of us, have one-on-one meetings with nearly 400 cruise lines, luxury hotels, tour operators and destination management companies. And we can leverage those relationships to make sure our clients are well-cared-for when they travel.

We’re loyal to our standards of professionalism.

We’re not only members of the American Society of Travel Advisors, we’re actively engaged with the professional association that represents our industry. We stay on top of the issues and trends that affect our industry. When the pandemic saw travel ground to a halt, we canceled hundreds of thousands of dollars in travel for our clients, and none of our clients had to spend even a minute on hold with an airline or tour operator.

We invest in technology to keep your personal information safe when we book travel for you. We have an itinerary app to ensure that we can upload all of your confirmations and reservations into an app, so that it’s all in one place and easy to access as a .pdf, on your computer, or on your smartphone or mobile device. But the technologies we use are designed to enhance and simplify your travel experience, not to remove the human factor from the planning process.

So, if you prioritize loyalty when you travel — we do too.

Ready to book a trip? We’re ready to be your trusted travel advisors!