After a year when Travel Leaders Group proved one of the Power List agencies most actively growing through acquisition, all while marking the first year of its Travel Leaders Network agency consortium and franchise, the company vows that there won't be any letup in 2018 in its commitment to growth.
"We've got a fairly aggressive plan to continue acquiring at the pace we have been, or even more, from an acquisition standpoint," Travel Leaders CEO Ninan Chacko said.
Perhaps, but 2017 could be a tough act to follow. Travel Leaders last year merged with former Power List member Altour and acquired or integrated several agencies, including Corporate Travel Services, Travel Management Partners, Andrew Harper Travel, Colletts Travel, CruCon Cruise Outlet (another 2017 Power List member), Travel-On and Travelmore.
The merger with business travel-focused Altour, announced in July, was the largest of the deals. Chacko said Altour generally has operated as-is since the deal while officials explore integration opportunities.
"We're just in the first stages of figuring out where we can take tools, technology, processes and, in some cases, service desk and apply them to different parts of the business, both in the U.K., where Altour has a healthy presence, and stateside," Chacko said. "That's been an ongoing dialogue and discussion. I'm very pleased that we're starting to map out in an appropriate way where teams and talent from both sides of the business are starting to identify where that low-hanging fruit can be mined and potentially acted upon."
Travel Leaders, which is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year, has a long history of acquisition, particularly in the past few years. A key benefit of that growth strategy is increased leverage with travel suppliers, Chacko said.
"One thing we very formally did in 2018, even though the groundwork was laid prior to that, was to bring all of that into a centralized supplier strategy that was really being executed at the Travel Leaders Group level," he said.
"We've now got in place a strategy that recognizes the volume and our footprint of this business that's generating, let's say, north of $25 billion or so in gross travel volume that flows through 50,000-plus agents and using that to establish the right depth and breadth of relationship with core supplier partners."
Sharing systems and integrating back-office processes can lower costs, but that's easier said than done, particularly at the pace with which Travel Leaders continues to bring agencies into its organization; already in 2018, the company has acquired Scotland's Barrhead Travel Group. As such, Chacko said, Travel Leaders does not have the luxury of sequentially integrating each acquisition with existing systems and processes.
"We're really going about it by prioritizing where we think we'll have the biggest impact in the business, addressing those integration opportunities first and, frankly, leaving other things for a future point," he said. "Some of which, candidly, we may never get to. But I think as long as we're able to most importantly service our clients and travelers effectively with the right level of service, with the right level of support, deliver on our supplier commitment and ultimately create a growing enterprise that generates more profitability for our shareholders and investors, then I think we're on the right track."
One integration that is continuing is the unification of Travel Leaders Group's Travel Leaders Associates, Results Travel and Vacation.com into the Travel Leaders Network, which formally launched at the beginning of 2017. The new network features the company's Agent Profiler lead-generation tool and what Chacko called a "core identity" in the market.
Travel Leaders wanted to "really draft off of those supply relationships to end up delivering a more valuable proposition to the members within each of those networks. So what we ended up doing was harmonize the way we dealt with them, harmonize the technology, training and services as part and parcel of it," Chacko said. "Let's leverage some scale that we have in this business, and rather than put it into three, can we create something even larger than the sum of the parts? So one plus one equals more than three. That was really our objective."