Consultancy support and new technology systems are part of agency consortium’s strategy for the next five years. Advantage’s Julia Lo Bue-Said and Steven Esom explain the plan to Hollie-Rae Merrick
Advantage to beef up consultancy support
The Advantage Travel Partnership is introducing more consultancy services to help members entice a new generation of customers to book with independent agents.
The agency consortium’s new Vision 2020 strategy aims to boost members’ revenues and bring in new customers who may have previously booked online.
Julia Lo Bue-Said, managing director, said she believed the industry was going through a “generation change” and that members could take advantage of a gap in the market if they had the right tools to serve younger customers.
To achieve this, and as part of the five-year plan, Advantage is looking to create more consultancy services and training options for members.
Lo Bue-Said said recent research suggested the average age of customers was getting older, but that a generation of younger consumers weren’t being reached.
“This generation isn’t booking through agents because we’re not personalising our approach to them and we’re not speaking their lingo and we aren’t communicating with them in the manner they want us to,” she said.
“There is a generation out there that want to be treated differently and we see our role as trying to ensure Advantage members have the tools and training to allow them to nurture this new client.”
Steven Esom, non-executive chairman of Advantage, said its Vision 2020 strategy would “build foundations” to take the organisation and its members forward at a time when the needs of consumers continue to change.
“We are focused on the important things that make a clear difference to our membership,” he said.
“This is a sharp strategy with very clear aims to grow our members’ business and provide them with the tools to do so.
“This is a strategy which is very aligned to our members’ needs and that’s extremely important.
“We don’t deliver and change things for the sake of it; our strategy has our members at its core.”
The strategy includes investment in Advantage Managed Services and new technology. It will also provide access to more air product, help maximise margins and earnings of leisure members and introduce a suitable system for a full dynamic packaging proposition.
Developing consultancy support for traditional Advantage members was fundamental to the new structure, Lo Bue-Said said.
The consortium introduced business consultancy earlier this year and has already provided the service to 32 members.
Within the first year of the new strategy being rolled out, Lo Bue-Said said the aim was to get 60 members using the consultancy support to reassess the needs of their businesses.
Through Vision 2020, Advantage believes that within a year it can help achieve incremental earnings across the organisation of £450,000 and a margin differential of one percentage point over its competitors.
Group to unveil CRM system
Advantage plans to unveil a new central customer relationship management (CRM) system next October.
The technology will help Advantage head office track booking trends and help agents tailor consumer campaigns, according to managing director Julia Lo Bue-Said.
“The CRM system will change how we operate with the membership. It will help us understand the membership better through profiling and how we engage with them,” she said. “It will make our engagement with members more sophisticated and give us the metrics to deliver real value.”
Consortium develops dynamic package tool
Advantage’s “current inability” to dynamically package will be addressed through Vision 2020, according to Julia Lo Bue-Said.
The consortium’s managing director said dynamic packaging [DP] had proved a problem in the past and she wanted to offer members a system to bring together mainstream products.
The system would be similar to the Cruise & More tool, which was unveiled by Advantage earlier this year, allowing members to package up cruise holidays.
“One thing we don’t currently do is provide our members with a full dynamic packaging proposition,” said Lo Bue-Said.
“Our third‑party suppliers are incredibly important and we will continue to service them.
“We don’t see this as a way of moving business away. Our strategy is all about driving more business and new business.
“To ensure our members have a sustainable future we need to work through our own product offering.
“This new service is in development now and by the time we get to conference [in Turkey in May 2015] there will be a lot more to talk about. I would expect something similar to Cruise & More – giving members this ability to DP with Advantage as the umbrella brand is really where we are heading.”
Steven Esom, non-executive chairman, said Advantage would not be creating a product for the sake of it and also would not replicate something already available, adding: “Why duplicate when you can innovate?”
Currently the Cruise & More tool is only bookable offline but, as part of Vision 2020, Lo Bue‑Said revealed plans to make it accessible online.
Target growth set for AMS
The Advantage Managed Services division will become a “cornerstone of the business”, having been tucked away since it was created four years ago.
Managed agents have back‑office and regulatory issues handled directly for them by Advantage.
Julia Lo Bue-Said said that until now AMS hadn’t been shouted about or marketed enough, but that would change as the consortium looks to raise the number of AMS outlets from 20 to 128 in the next five years. That growth would see AMS turnover reach £163 million.
To pursue that target, Advantage has launched Corporate AMS for business agents, a proposition that launched this month with one agent, Business Travel Experts.
Lo Bue-Said believes the “ambitious numbers” would also be achieved through the acquisition of agencies from other consortia and start-up companies joining Advantage.
Steven Esom said: “The exciting thing is that we have many leisure members who would like to develop a corporate business but haven’t got the tools to do it.”
Vision 2020 targets
- To recruit 20 new Advantage members and 18 Advantage Managed Services members within a year.
- To provide new services to the external consultancy portfolio including social media, mystery shopping and shop redesign.
- To have 200 members actively involved in customer relationship management (CRM) campaigns and 100 members with an Advantage white-label website.
- To provide incremental earnings of £450,000 across the organisation within a year, and within five years to boost that to £700,000.