March 31 marks the date when Journese, the luxury brand of Pleasant Holidays, sunsets. The company will launch a new luxury travel brand, Evoke | Inspire, with enhanced services and an elevated portfolio.
Evoke | Inspire was created to deliver FIT trips through a new portfolio of high-end hotels, private villas, yachts, jets, and rail journeys. The brand now has its own concierge services and customer service provided 24/7 by U.S.-based support.
The move comes just a little over a year since David Hu took over the reins at Pleasant Holidays following the retirement of Jack Richards, who ran the company for 17 years. Pleasant Holidays, which has been in business for more than 50 years, is now under the ownership of AAA of Southern California, as is Evoke | Inspire. The companies all work under a holding company called A | T Collective.
Hu, who headed up Classic Vacations for 13 years before stepping down in 2022, last April brought James Kareka, a former Classic colleague over to Pleasant Holidays as the vice president and managing director of trade brands. We caught up with Kareka at GTM Luxury last month to get the lowdown on the new Evoke | Inspire brand, which he has been working on essentially since he was hired last year.
Kareka has been in the travel industry for his entire career and hails from the agency side (Casto Travel) originally. He was most recently senior director of sales of Apple Leisure Group.
When he came on board, he and Hu spent a lot of time identifying where Pleasant Holidays and Journese sat in the market competitively and who their audiences should be. Kareka says he did a series of discovery calls internally and externally, to determine the paths for the two brands.
“We ultimately decided that Pleasant is our legacy brand and is very well-known and does a very good job in the premium space, but Journese needed some work to compete in the luxury space,” he told World of Luxury.
The decision was made to start an entirely new luxury brand rather than just revamp Journese.
For this reason, he sees Evoke | Inspire as a startup with a new portfolio of products and services. And while some of the reservations consultants who were with Journese have been transitioned over to the new brand, the company has also hired eight new reservationists, bringing that team to 16 total, plus three supervisors.
Evoke | Inspire had a soft launch to Journese’s top 20 to 25 advisors on January 12, with its official debut to the entire industry happening on April 1. (Note: Those bookings made through Journese will continue to be serviced by Journese all the way through their end travel dates by the same team that's managing them now.)
“It was important to us that we have a period of collaboration with our best customers to make sure that there were no gaps. They’ve been hugely instrumental so far in guiding us,” said Kareka, noting that Evoke | Inspire is purely B-to-B.
Kareka and his colleagues ran four boardroom sessions at GTM Luxury where they presented the new Evoke | Inspire brand. They also attended a series of roundtable sessions with luxury travel advisors at GTM Luxury and found the feedback to be positive. GTM Luxury is owned by Northstar Travel Group, as is Travel Weekly/World of Luxury.
“It was the first event we've attended, and it has solidified the fact that we are needed,” said Kareka said of the feedback he received from advisors. “We’re introducing a lot of things that our competitors are not doing currently.”
So, what’s different?
“We are paying much closer attention to that space between arrival and departure, where it matters,” he says. “The logistics are important. How you get there and the ease of getting there is important. The arrival experience is critically important.”
What happens in the destination is equally as vital, he says. “We need to do a better job of understanding who the end customer is and what their preferences are. For example, if I don't drink alcohol and I check into a hotel and there's a bottle of wine in my room, that’s a very kind gesture but it's lost on me because I'm not going to drink it.”
Along those lines, Evoke | Inspire will provide a customer profile to travel advisors for their clients with questions such as, are there any dietary restrictions? What do you hope to get out of this experience? What's most important to you?”
Kareka uses the example that he is a culinary guy and would respond that he wants to go into a destination and really experience the cuisine so he can go home and practice it there. “Those details are the things we want to do a better job of capturing and pass that on to our partners,” he says. In addition, DMCs have been added in Europe to fill gaps that were identified.
“If clients are celebrating any milestones or if a family or couple that’s traveling wants to have a picnic in the park, we’ll help arrange that,” says Kareka who emphasizes that it’s essential to know what clients want out of a trip.
In line with its luxury ethos, Evoke | Inspire will provide private transfers in all its destinations as well as private drivers and guides. Evoke | Inspire’s reservationists will be able to work with concierge teams within a destination to fulfill dinner reservations, theater tickets and spa appointments.
Evoke | Inspire's hotel portfolio will drastically change from what was offered at Journese. Gone are the three-and-a-half and four-star properties; rather, only four-and-a-half and five-star properties will comprise the new brand’s accommodations portfolio. Current hotel partners include Fairmont, Rosewood, Belmond, Como and Ritz-Carlton, and that list will continue to grow.
Kareka says that raising the level of hotels offered will fix the challenge that Journese had a lot of overlap with the hotels offered by Pleasant Holidays.
“Over time, I think the Journese brand started to lose some integrity because multiple brands within a company can start to become very similar to one another. Part of our discovery call process disclosed that. Our advisors were saying they were not sure they understood the difference between [Pleasant and Journese] anymore,” said Kareka.
Evoke | Inspire is not using third-party sources for any of its inventory, he says.
“Everything is directly contracted, and that's very important. So many companies are trying to scale their business, and they use OTAs or bed banks to source inventory where we do not. The hotel knows the bookings coming from us, and then we feed to them the agency name, their ARC number, and their consortium. That makes a big difference because the last thing you want to do is show up at a hotel and be told you were booked through X, Y, Z and not have any idea who that is or why,” says Kareka.
Another differentiator? “All of Evoke | Inspire’s reservation team is hired by us, trained by us, managed by us. We don't outsource any of our services,” he says.
The brand has also added services from Rail Europe to help piece itineraries together. Private jets, private yachts, and private residences are also available in the portfolio.
“We are creating a brand with great intention and making sure that we're servicing the luxury advisor the way they need to be serviced,” he says.
Kareka tells us that launching Evoke | Inspire has probably been one of the most exciting projects he’s worked on in his career. “Creating a brand from the ground up is great. Our team has been awesome. They are all 100 percent in and are making sure that our vision is executed well.”
“We wanted to carve out a new path,” he adds. “We didn't want to do the same thing we have always done or that others in our space have always done. We want to be very intentional about our approach here. It’s very easy for companies in our space to become very transactional, with air, car and hotel components. And I think often companies are trying to scale their business so quickly they lose the essence of what it means to travel.”