Richard Turen
It seemed, at first, beyond comprehension.
I would be sitting at my desk in my home office, with a bottle of pinot noir produced on a client's vineyard in Oregon and a cup of my favorite Gorilla Decaf from San Francisco both within arm's reach. In my comfy cocoon, I would, with very little effort, have the opportunity to interview large portions of the top executives in our industry as they stopped by to visit me at home, one by one. I could ask them anything I wanted.
Two years' worth of interviews in the space of four days. And I wore shorts the entire week.
I wasn't sure it would ever work. Like a nocturnal travel vulture swooping down to pick up bits of travel information off the ground, I have, for the past 22 years, headed to the annual meeting of Virtuoso, the largest gathering of luxury travel consultants and suppliers on Earth.
Given the growth of this gathering, there are only a few places on the planet that could house us. Very quickly, the Bellagio in Las Vegas, along with sister properties Aria and Vdara, became the base camp for a week of face-to-face meetings, each lasting several minutes, one right after another. I (along with a few thousand others) would sit at my little designated table in a grand ballroom, sharing the opportunity to meet nearly anyone in travel I wanted to meet.
But this was not a year that top-tier, upscale travel advisors from more than 90 countries could gather in close quarters, sharing space and air. This year's meeting was virtual, in essence an international Zoom meeting with 4,300 participants. Imagine a Zoom call lasting a week, broken into 72,768 10-minute meetings plus an impressive variety of professional-development classes and focused training sessions.
I was initially skeptical. How could it possibly work?
Up to the day of the meeting, I had never been on Zoom. I like using the telephone. I was going to start using Zoom at some point -- perhaps 2024? -- but I just could never find the time to make it my top priority.
So I sat down for my first meeting a virtual newbie with a full schedule of appointments, a mix of mutual requests and invitations. And about one hour into it, I was wowed -- impressed beyond expectations. I chatted with a Four Seasons manager in his office, marveling at the size of the room. AmaWaterways had a great setup with our sales manager on a TV screen in the meeting while one of the cruise line's executives, Gary Murphy, revealed that the company's owners "hate debt," so the line paid cash for its last 10 vessels. A really important bit of intelligence in these financially challenged times.
I shared tears with friends calling from Istanbul, I was interrupted by a dog in Paris, and I managed to visit on-site offices from all over the globe that provided incredible information, including the idea that most flights to Greenland land on the east coast but the best hotel and sightseeing is on the west coast, and the best way to get there is on one of the daily nonstops from Copenhagen. I got excited about doing two-hour drives from Venice to Croatia.
We laughed, we cried, we placed our hands against our screens to replace the hugs we all miss so much. And the technology worked beautifully.
I made it a point to end each meeting asking how they felt this virtual meeting was going compared with previous meetings in Las Vegas. Without exception, every supplier told me they preferred it, because the flying, changing time zones and forced socialization was replaced by a calm, casual, comfortable face-to-face exchange of ideas. And from a journalistic point of view, I found you get better responses from people when you are talking with them in their living room after they have had a good night's sleep. It will, quite frankly, be difficult to return to Las Vegas.