I rode a bit of bike and did some swimming in preparation for my yearly one week marathon race inside the still incomparable Bellagio in Las Vegas. Actually, I sat through most of the marathon except for those times I stood up at cocktail parties, where no one ever speaks to me for fear their words might end up here.
It was our annual consortium gathering, a meeting that allows me to combine my career and my hobby into one giant conversation fest with virtually everyone I need to talk with professionally.
The statistics this year were amazing. There were 4,200 attendees representing more than 90 countries. The Bellagio announced it was their largest annual conference. Sitting among the tables in the Grand Ballroom each day I tried to imagine what the mainstream press might say if it realized that the folks in front and in back of me had produced just short of $10 billion in luxury sales revenue in 2012. I had 702 personal appointments, conversations, and contacts. I kept count. And you know what was most interesting? I just couldn’t find a pessimist in the room with the exception of one tour operator who could be forgiven. He operates out of Cairo.
Business is up, business is growing, and I could have thrown a football around the Grand Ballroom and hit dozens of consultants and independent contractors who are making six figure incomes in this industry.
The reason seems clear. Conspicuous consumption is back and the guilt associated with true one-of-a-kind luxury travel experiences seems to have disappeared, with the recession just another memory of something that happened to other folks. It is almost as though all of the one percenters contacted each other on their smartphones and announced that “it’s okay to brag about where you’ve been again.”
The Lux traveler had put trips on hold. But now, the dollar is doing better against the Euro, the stock market has been generating substantial returns, and it actually looks like a single, game-changing terrorist event is less likely now than it was five years ago. At least that’s what the public opinion polls tell us is the traveler’s perception.
But if you wanted to get a sense of how these travel agents and their suppliers are doing, you needed to look outside the Bellagio. You needed to try to score a reservation at one of Las Vegas’ premier restaurants. It was next to impossible, no matter who you knew. Hotel companies were feting their top producers in dining rooms across the city and many of the larger agencies were throwing parties for hoteliers to thank them for their support.
At least one herd of cows gave their lives to this show at places like Wolfgang Puck’s Cut in the Palazzo. Some of the European hoteliers were throwing parties at Estiatoro Milos in the Cosmopolitan, where the exquisite seafood was priced in line with the cost of a small fishing boat.
The French were taking some of their top agents to Guy Savoy in Caesar’s or Joel Robuchon over at MGM They felt they were saving money given the cost to dine in the Parisian outposts of these famed chefs.
The top travel suppliers work with travel agent advisory boards. They also have top production echelon members. So that’s two annual parties right there. Then, on the agent side, groups of suppliers are invited to be thanked for their support, their favorable pricing, their not infrequent upgrades, and VIP recognition of guests. It is classic one hand washes the other big business.
In fact, if you are a serious player in travel these days, you reciprocate your supplier’s assistance and generosity during the year by thanking them in some public way at the annual consortium meeting or at a gala staged in the agency owner’s home. This is the way business is done and the smaller agency has little idea of the relationships being formed by social bonding.
Heads of marketing at the largest travel agencies put careful thought into the annual “Thank You” bash, an event often preceded by the annual “Thank You Client” Bash.
Meanwhile, I met a lot of folks with titles like “Director of Social Media Services” or “Vice President of Social Marketing”. They were busy getting word out about their parties for their VIP Twitter and Facebook users. It wasn’t enough to throw a party, it had to be a party surrounded by buzz.
I kept trying to see trends in all of the meetings. The biggest single trend I could discern was that hotel chefs all over the world now share a certain laziness when it comes to shopping. They are all rushing to open organic and locally sustainable gardens on their hotel grounds in close proximity to the kitchen. I heard about these new farm-to-table efforts so often during the week that I imagined there must be a severe shortage of organic manure in certain portions of Western Europe.
On a personal level, I tried to figure out just which hotels know our clients are birthed from within our agency loins. That is to say, I was determined to find out whether or not hotel management knows that a guest is sent from a particular agency when that guest is booked through a wholesaler or upscale supplier.
The fact is they don’t. The vast majority of suppliers believe that the name of the booking agency is proprietary information so hotels rarely are informed as to the name of the agency or agent. One hotelier told me that supplier reservations “usually pass through four desks” before they reach the hotel so the identity of the booking agency/agent is “long lost”.
I left the meeting determined to book hotels directly through senior management from now on. That might get me even more dinner invitations to turn down next year.
Breaking my “back in your room by 8:00 pm. when you have a 6:00 am. wake-up call’ rule, I did venture out one evening to something called “Hyde”, an oh so trendy, lounge in the Bellagio with an enviable position overlooking the shooting fountains.
Bellagio’s Fountains, by the way, were named America’s Top Tourist Attraction by TripAdvisor, a bit of a stretch since the spurting water is not even the top attraction in the hotel, an honor that would have to go to the property’s Gallery of Fine Art. But that is just my opinion. I realize that many tourists can watch oversize lawn sprinklers for hours.
I was attending a cocktail party thrown by one of the world’s premier tour operators. It was a lovely party, the highlight of which was a story related by the host of how he and his wife had once climbed up to the top of Mount Killimanjaro and his bride would not let go of a cumbersome bag. It turned out she had brought along a pair of her favorite “Manolo shoes” because she did not want to be photographed at the peak in hiking boots.
So the 1% of the 28% who actually own a passport are back to doing true luxury travel. And next year, their neighbors better be prepared to hear some really exotic places name-dropped over cocktails.
