US-BASED The Travel Corporation expects Asia to account for 40 per cent of its revenue in five years, from 15 per cent now, as it rolls out a strategic plan to tap the region’s outbound markets.

Brett Tollman, president and chief executive, outlined a brand-centric approach in enlarging the company’s Asian pie. This will see his brands such as Trafalgar and Insight Vacations being launched in non-English speaking markets such as China and Japan, but customised to the needs of these travellers in language, content and length of travel, among others.

In China, for instance, a new hire has been made, based in Shanghai, to lead the branded business and work with agency partners on customised Chinese-speaking departures.

Said Tollman: “What you saw before was our custom group business was done under the brand Trafalgar, but it was obviously not a Trafalgar product or experience and we didn’t want to damage or give the wrong perception of what a Trafalgar experience was if someone out of Japan or China was buying a custom group through agency X. (Thus) we’ve rebranded last fall, so those custom group offices are called Travel Corporation Asia, Travel Corporation China and Travel Corporation Japan.”

The shift is major for the US-based company, which traditionally specialises in English-speaking custom group business – individuals travelling in a group on a holiday – and whose largest market is the US, followed by Australia, Canada, the UK, South Africa, New Zealand, Singapore, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Malaysia, South Korea and Taiwan.

Tollman, in an interview with TTG Asia e-Daily on the sidelines of the WTTC Global Summit, said: “Our investment over the next three to five years will include putting marketing into those markets to build awareness of these brands, working primarily through agency partners who already have the customers, by providing cooperative marketing support so they can educate their customers on these products in addition to the ocean cruising or FIT they might be selling.”

The Travel Corporation is also opening an office in Jakarta. “We’ve been doing custom group business out of Indonesia for some time but there has not been an office there and we’ve seen fantastic growth, so we’re expanding our commitment and investment there,” he said.

Tollman added: “All of our brands, with the exception of Uniworld (boutique river cruise collection) and Red Carnation Hotel Collection, are not luxury brands but are outstanding mid-market brands. Obviously, the mid-market will be growing exponentially in Asia and therefore we want to establish our brands here (in Asia).

“As a family-run private business, we look at long-term commitment and vision as to where we want to be in 10, 20 years time, so we’re not constrained by short-term profitability issues.”

Meanwhile, on the inbound side, Trafalgar is launching a Japan programme, which will operate next year. “We’re very committed to supporting the Japanese in their period of recovery but we also believe there will be growing interest from our traditional European/American markets for Japan, so we’re very excited about launching that this year, with operations starting next year,” he said.

Read View from the Top with Brett Tollman, TTG Asia May 4, 2012

STARWOOD Hotels & Resorts Worldwide president & CEO, Frits van Paasschen, says the company is building better hotels thanks to growth in Asia, but shies away from the need to create an Asian-centric brand for Asian guests which can even be exported to the West.

US-based hotel chains have been successful in exporting their brands to Asia, but the rapid rise of Asian consumers has seen hotel companies prototyping brands native to Asia or tweaking existing ones to suit the needs of Asian guests.

InterContinental Hotels Group has just unveiled Hualuxe catering to the upscale Chinese traveller, while Accor is re-engineering ts Grand Mercure in China to cater to the domestic travel market.

But van Paasschen told TTG Asia e-Daily: “I don’t think of our brands as being Western brands, but global brands.

“The key to having a global brand is to appeal to basic human needs that cut across cultures, ages, generations and incomes. So a desire to have a sense of wellness and refuge in a hotel, a desire to be extravagant, to feel like you are in a creative atmosphere – those things cut across cultures.”

“The more important thing is not having a Chinese brand, or Japanese, or French. It is having global brands that work anywhere in the world,” he said.

During a panel discussion at the WTTC Global Summit, van Paasschen said “globalisation is not Westernisation” and that a huge fear he had was disappointing Asian customers staying in Starwood hotels in the West that might not meet their expectations.

“Sure, labour costs are lower in Asia, but Asians have this natural hospitality and Asia has raised the bar for us,” he said.

Parag Khanna, director, Hybrid Reality Institute, who keynoted the session on a rapidly-changing world, said that for the first time in history, “globalisation is truly global”, with all regions of the world being equal and important.

Van Paasschen, when queried by TTG Asia e-Daily if Starwood’s last real brand innovation was the W, said: “Oh no, I wouldn’t say that at all. We launched two brands three years ago, Aloft and Element, which I think are every bit as revolutionary in their segments as W. Even for a brand like Sheraton, which is 75 years old, to re-conceive the lobby as a cyber cafe very much current to the 21st century traveller is every bit a reinvention of an older brand as creating a new one.”

Asked if there are too many hotel brands in the market, creating consumer confusion, he said: “I don’t think ours are too many. We have nine brands today. I’m a half full kind of person and I think may be Sheraton is the only one I would say truly has a global scale, so we have plenty to do with the nine we have.”

Asked to comment on the retirement of Miguel Ko, the chain’s chairman and president in Asia-Pacific, van Paasschen said: “The important thing is to look at this is a planned retirement. We’re filling all of the open positions in sequence with internal executives and doing this at a time when our business is doing well. All of those things point to a healthy corporate culture.

“I couldn’t be more sorry to see a friend and an admired colleague leave than Miguel, but I also have no doubt we would not miss a beat in terms of what work we have to do. Miguel has also agreed to stay on as non-executive chairman, which reflects his deep relationship with Starwood.”

Effective July 1, Stephen Ho, currently senior vice president of acquisitions and development for Starwood China, will become president of Asia-Pacific. Qian Jin, currently head of Starwood’s operations for China, will be promoted to president of Greater China, reflecting the country’s importance for Asia-Pacific and the company.

EIGHT travel and related associations have jumped on a new coalition to press a case for tourism to governments.

As of now, the coalition comprises the WTTC, UNWTO, IATA, PATA, World Economic Forum, American Society of Travel Agents, Cruise Lines International Association, Airports Council International and the US Travel Association.

Their alliance was a result of a call in May last year by the WTTC for the industry to come together with one voice to effectively engage governments to give real support to tourism.

Governments continue to confound the industry with their bureaucratic visa processing and taxation policies, the UK APD and EU-ETS being the most odious taxes right now. These two current hot button issues – visas and taxes – reflect governments’ lack of real understanding of how tourism could support the economy, industry CEOs said.

IATA’s director-government and industry affairs, Jeff Poole, said IATA alone could not convince governments of the foolishness of taxation, which was why it joined the coalition. He scathingly said that “politicians don’t know, don’t want to know and when they do know, they don’t care”.

A tourism minister, South Africa’s Marthinus van Schalkwyk, said the sooner the industry organised itself property, the faster the government sector would engage it, rather than the other way round. He said while the coalition was fine, it was still too ‘loose’. It needed a permanent institutional mechanism that could effectively convey the industry’s unified view on a specific issue.

David Scowsill, WTTC’s president and CEO, said the coalition was about “coalescing around the same issue” and demonstrating a case through research findings and where it actually counted for politicians, for example, connecting jobs to visas.

The coalition’s immediate opportunity is to make a go of the G-20 leaders meeting in Los Cabos, Mexico, this June and present each G-20 country a “profile” of how its visa processing policies impact jobs. Preliminary findings of research for this campaign commissioned by WTTC and UNTO show, for example, that for every 37 extra visas the US issues, it is creating one job.

Scowsill also pointed out that it was thanks to intense lobbying by WTTC member CEOs such as Bill Marriott and Hubert Joly (Choice Hotels International) that “finally resulted in President Obama’s Executive Order to Hilary Clinton in the state department, to speed up visa processing from Brazil, China and other countries”.

Said Scowsill: “Only last week President Obama signed another significant agreement on the same visa issue with the Brazilian President, Dilma Rousseff. Obama finally ‘gets it’. Let’s hope he is still around after November, otherwise we will have to start over again with someone else.”