The global community of luxury travel advisors and specialist suppliers has started its march into Asia. Virtuoso CEO Matthew Upchurch details his plans for the company in this region and discusses what makes a great travel advisor and the travel trends to watch
Virtuoso is building up its Asian presence. What are the resources put into this effort?
We opened an office in 2019 in Shanghai that was supposed to be for all of Asia. However, this year, we decided that it was important for us to separate Greater China from the rest of Asia. Our team in Shanghai would focus on Greater China while another would focus on North Asia (for South Korea and Japan) and South-east Asia. We found that Singapore was the perfect place for us to start this new team.
Raymond Ang leads as general manager for the North Asia and South-east Asia office, and is joined by Angeline Tang as account manager, member relations, and Eunice Lee as marketing manager.
Our approach here is exactly what we do everywhere else. We start with a team and we build the momentum. This office in Singapore is supported by the team that builds our global infrastructure – branding, technology, and curation of all of our partnerships.
Virtuoso has 20,000 travel advisor members across 58 countries now. How large is the Asian membership, and does the size of your travel advisor network matter?
We have 68 members in Asia, and 19 specifically in North Asia and South-east Asia. The new team will grow this network, but there is no magic number. What matters for us most is the quality of travel advisors in our network. We don’t just add members; the Virtuoso membership is by invitation only.
We regulate our membership from the perspective of the size of the market and growth potential – and I see tremendous growth potential in this region.
We’ve always felt that the number one competitor for Virtuoso is not really other travel agencies, but clients who book travel themselves. So, we really focus on making sure that we develop a number of travel advisors that can meet the market demand.
How does a travel advisor earn the invitation to join the Virtuoso membership?
It is primarily referrals followed by a track record of having successfully built enough business to show they have the skills to grow. We also require our members to engage and have the mentality of wanting to help others because we believe that there’s more to be gained by sharing than by keeping to yourself.
This has been part of Virtuoso’s ethos for a long time. In fact, the thing that makes the Virtuoso network so powerful is the core benefit of sharing information and best practices on a global scale.
Virtuoso is really most useful to travel advisors who have already have built some sort of a track record around dealing with the luxury experiential client. We tend not to be a good solution for those who have never done it.
I’ve always used this analogy: the Stradivarius violin does not make much of a difference if you’re just learning to play. But if you are at the top of your art, then the quality of that instrument really makes a difference.
How do you define ‘enough business’?
We look at total luxury production divided by the number of travel advisors in the firm. We are aware of the different types of business models – some members are boutique and do only luxury travel while some are larger entities with a division or department specialising in luxury travel.
Have you come across travel advisors who are very close to qualifying for the membership invitation? Does Virtuoso help to close that gap?
We don’t have a formal way of doing that, but we always engage people and give them some ideas of things that they might be able to do or areas of the business that they could grow into.
For example, expedition cruising is so hot right now. So, we could recommend a potential member to look at selling expedition cruises to lift production.
In fact, we did this with a travel advisor in China. They picked just two expedition companies (to sell) and made US$1.2 million within a year. And so, they were immediately qualified.
A recent McKinsey report stated that the demand for luxury travel is expected to grow faster that any other industry segment, fuelled by both a spike in the high net-worth individual population and the number of aspiring luxury travellers. Is this triggering a spike in new-gen travel advisors coming into the industry?
This is absolutely happening. There is one important thing a travel advisor today should know: you would have lost the game the moment you told people that you booked travel for a living.
There are many ways to book travel and more are being invented every day. People need to understand that a real travel advisor adds value in three different areas – before the trip, during the trip, and after the trip.
We’ve done this consumer research that told us the one thing that differentiates a transactional travel agent from a trusted travel advisor: it is what happens after a trip. A trusted travel advisor will try to learn and engage with the client after the trip to ask what could be done better.
What value can Virtuoso bring to travel advisors wanting to excel in the luxury travel game?
People new to the game don’t realise that when they are serving this high-end segment of travellers, who are so very well travelled, well educated, and technologically savvy, they cannot possibly be more knowledgeable than their customers. In fact, there is no way anyone can know everything about everywhere.
This is where Virtuoso shows value to travel advisors. We have a global network of we call Virtuoso on-sites, which are in-country destination experts. The number of Virtuoso on-sites varies by destination. In Italy, which is our number one destination, we have dozens of Virtuoso on-sites. Some of our travel advisor members have placed their clients in three-way calls with our Virtuoso on-site representatives when conversations on destination planning get a little too complex. These destination experts are not simply pulling something off the Internet; they are vetted and qualified people who know the destination and will be servicing your clients on the ground.
This gives customers a lot of confidence and allows the travel advisor to serve with speed.
At the same time, to be a Virtuoso preferred partner (hotels, cruise lines, tour operators, specialty providers, and tourism board), you must have a dedicated Virtuoso contact. No Virtuoso travel advisor will ever have to send an email to a hotel or tour company with an address that is enquiry@partner.com. The Virtuoso partner must provide the name of a person who is pre-committed to being available for Virtuoso work.
The other thing that we do for travel advisors is the huge investment of time and effort in networking opportunities. The quality of the relationship travel advisors have with our Virtuoso partners can change the quality of the experience for the client. We started our main show, the Virtuoso Travel Week, at the Bellagio in Las Vegas in the late-80s, running appointments for 5,000 people from nearly from 100 countries. Today, we are doing hundreds of thousands of appointments every year.
Is the Virtuoso Preferred Partner programme as tightly curated as you do with your travel advisor network?
We curate everything. We never accept brands across the board. Just because Hotel XYZ in this destination is a Virtuoso Preferred Partner does not mean others around the world carrying the XYZ brand will be too.
We are now updating our Virtuoso on-site programme to become even more granular by creating specialty operators for just one region. In Italy, for example, there would be someone in the Dolomites and another in Sicily.
Meanwhile, we are creating a whole new programme just for villas and homes. We have partners with amazing standalone villas as well as hotel partners with villas. A good example in this region is the Capella Bangkok, which has absolutely beautiful villas that are right on the Chao Phraya River.
As we continue to watch travel trends, we are working to spot regional products that are really good for a particular outbound market but not quite for others.
The next Virtuoso Symposium is confirmed on Crystal Serenity, sailing from Barcelona to Marseille from May 13 to 17 in 2025. Are you planning the 2026 edition now?
We are getting bids. In making our destination choice, we have to balance the desire for new places with available public-private collaboration. We tend to like places where our partners are supported by the local government, which results in win-win for all. We also want the symposium to be an opportunity to see a destination differently.
Let’s look forward. What trends in luxury travel will be advantageous to Virtuoso members and partners?
I’d like to start with what I call creative tension in luxury clients wanting to return to places they know and love and to try out somewhere different. The secret to addressing that creative tension lies in creating pairings of the two. A lot of our travel advisor members are having to get creative, so that their clients can get the best of two destinations.
Another trend is the rise of high-end travellers getting out of the peak season and out of primary destinations and into smaller secondary and tertiary cities.
Thirdly, we are excited about the rise in multi-generational travel. This is growing tremendously in Asia outbound. A subset of that is skip-gen travel, where grandparents take their grandchildren on holiday.
Other encouraging trends include expedition cruises hotting up, as mentioned before; newer destinations coming into the marketplace; and silver bullet wellness. Saudi Arabia is building a lot of incredible things now. While it is still early days, Saudi Arabia is ideal for early adopters. As for silver bullet wellness, it is travel for the purpose of health rejuvenation.
I am glad you spoke about multi-generational travel and skip-gen travel. The global population is aging; one in six people will be 65 years and up in 2025. However, with the quality of life and healthcare, 65 is considered a young age, and people now have extended opportunities to travel in one lifetime because they are still active and well.
One hundred per cent, Karen. We now have six generations of travellers – very healthy and active older people right through to Generation Alpha, and everything in between.
Are there enough travel advisors who are in tune with this silver market?
Part of Virtuoso’s success is due to the development of our travel advisors matching the development of our customer base.
I will cite you an example. We have a travel advisor member in Dallas who just turned 90. Her energy is ridiculous. She went with her granddaughter to a Taylor Swift concert in Paris, and danced, sang and screamed the entire three hours. Somebody behind her filmed her and posted it on Instagram, saying, who is this incredible grandmother? She went viral and has five million views now. For her 90th birthday, she went to Taylor Swift’s concert in London and found herself on the news channels where she spoke about travel and being youthful.
We are starting to get data on the travel potential of this segment of clients. In the next 15 years, the wealthiest cohort of US travellers will be single women over the age of 60.
As we grow in Asia, we want to be able to help our members identify ways to be successful in their business, and to develop new travel advisors that match these different types of consumer opportunities.
Right, so a travel advisor new to Virtuoso may not always be someone young.
Absolutely! We have a lot of travel advisors who are career-switchers as well as those who have reached 55 or 60 years-old and wanting to get out of their corporate job and try something else. There is a real entrepreneurial opportunity in travel and tourism.
However, we are also working to develop the next generation of travel advisors, which will in turn help us to attract the next generation of luxury travellers. We have an interesting observation from this effort. When people found out what a modern travel advisor actually does, which is more than just booking travel, they started to get interested in planned travel.
We live in a world where answers are cheap. You can search anything online and through AI. To get the right information from AI, we need prompt engineering, which involves asking the right question.
Now, what is the one thing that stresses travellers today? It is the questions that were not asked. What’s going to get me because I did not ask beforehand?
I see successful travel advisors as those who can do a good job simplifying things. Just because something is simple doesn’t mean it’s easy.
There’s a variation of a great Mark Twain quote that I use all the time: if I had more time and more energy, I would have written you a shorter letter.
