Travel Leaders Group (TLG) is aligning four of its brands into two, a move that will help simplify a complex company and benefit the brands by leveraging assets and realizing efficiencies.
TLG (No. 7 on Travel Weekly's 2019 Power List) recently announced that Travel Leaders Corporate would align with Altour and operate under the Altour brand name. Last week, TLG confirmed it was also exploring an alignment between its agencies Protravel International and Tzell Travel Group.
"We are having internal discussions with our advisors about aligning Tzell Travel Group and Protravel International under a unified operating division within our company, leveraging the expertise, programs, service and support teams of both organizations," CEO J.D. O'Hara said in a statement. "For now, it is business as usual."
The alignment of Travel Leaders Corporate and Altour is further along.
Altour joined TLG when the two announced a merger in 2017. At the time, TLG was No. 9 on the 2017 Power List, with $4.39 billion in sales, and Altour was No. 14, with $2.58 billion in sales.
"Since that day, [Travel Leaders Corporate] and Altour have been working together," Altour founder and CEO Alexandre Chemla said.
Travel Leaders Corporate has grown organically and through acquiring some 12 agencies in the past four years, said Gabe Rizzi, Travel Leaders Corporate's president and chief sales officer. Rizzi will assume the role of Altour's chief revenue officer.
"This really simplifies the entire go-to-market message for [TLG's] corporate entities," he said. "And Altour and Travel Leaders Corporate, they are very similar in their culture and in their value proposition."
The coronavirus crisis was not a factor in the decision to align Travel Leaders Corporate and Altour. In fact, Chemla said, the two had been working together since TLG's acquisition of Altour, with this alignment as the end goal.
However, the pandemic has offered a silver lining: time.
"With the decrease in transactions that we've seen, we've finally had an opportunity to actually spend some time on the integration work, of which there's always a lot," Rizzi said.
In addition to synergies and efficiencies gained, the alignment will also bring other benefits to both parties.
For instance, Rizzi said, Travel Leaders Corporate has frequently been asked how to extend leisure services to corporate accounts. While Travel Leaders Corporate had a partnership with Viator in place, that only offered corporate clients short experiences while on the road. Now, those clients can benefit from the expertise of Altour's leisure team.
Rizzi said clients have also been interested in Altour Air, the agency's private air service. According to Chemla, Altour Air's business is up 40% this month, as the entertainment industry (a specialty of Altour's) begins to travel again.
The pandemic has largely halted business travel, but both Altour and Travel Leaders Corporate have been working to stay in front of clients through calls and webinars.
Rizzi said the virus has also highlighted several areas that, for many corporate travel programs, need attention: out-of-program spend, duty of care and the ability to quickly locate and get in touch with traveling employees.
"We're trying to use the lessons learned from Covid to help our customers reshape and relaunch their travel programs post-virus," he said.
Once travel resumes, many believe leisure travel advisors will see a spike in interest from consumers frustrated by their experiences changing or canceling travel plans through OTAs or (in the case of do-it-yourselfers) call centers. The same is true in the corporate space, which will be a help in the future, Rizzi believes.
"The thousands of companies that have been more or less do-it-yourself — this pandemic has really demonstrated the value of the services we provide," he said. "Folks that may have been in the quote-unquote managed space are going to rethink that decision in a big way, because God bless those who are trying to negotiate with suppliers on their own with no relationship, no point of contact."