I recently attended the Vacation.com conference in Las Vegas, and had an absolutely amazing time. Now if you’re like most people wondering a) what on earth is Vacation.com and b) so what?
Vacation.com is a travel consortium. If you’re feeling confused don’t worry, you’re not alone. What it basically means is that they’re an organization that has established preferred relationships with some suppliers and some agencies that basically benefit everyone involved. Now until recently I was pretty leery of consortiums. When I was a new travel agent I worked at an agency that was part of another consortium and I found it very restrictive – we’d often get lectured for not selling the preferred suppliers and how we should push the preferred ones instead. So when we expanded the tour company into a full travel agency I thought you know I really don’t think I want to belong to a consortium – I want to be able to match the best product for my client without worrying about if it’s from a preferred supplier and what will happen if it’s not.
Then a few months ago I was approached by Vacation.com about joining them, and again I thought gosh I don’t know, I’m really not too big on consortiums. But I looked through their information and discovered that they had quite a list of preferred suppliers, which meant that most of the ones I’d be wanting to deal with were on the list. And being part of a consortium meant I’d have more weight with the suppliers. Let me put it this way:
- When you book by yourself, and you have a problem, to the supplier (hotel, cruise line, tour operator, etc) you’re one person.
- When you book with a travel agent, and you have a problem, to the supplier it means more because the agent represents more than just your booking, so it represents say 100 people.
- When you book with an agency that’s part of a consortium, and you have a problem, you not only have the weight of your agency behind it but the collective weight of all the consortium’s agencies, so it represents say 10,000 people.
So when you compare the bargaining and collective power behind being part of a consortium and being on your own, it just made sense to me to join so that I could provide that kind of backing to my clients.
So that’s how I ended up being part of Vacation.com.
And being part of Vacation.com is how I ended up at their conference in Las Vegas last week. And wow, it was just fantastic. There were so many sessions – with suppliers and office/organizational professionals and tech experts – it was just incredible. I came away from it feeling like I’d learned so much, and with so much enthusiasm… I mean how many times to do you go to something like a conference or a seminar and come away from it looking forward to going back to work? To me that’s just amazing.
