This August, four of us from Alabama World Travel (AWT) joined nearly 5,000 travel professionals from around the world in Las Vegas for Virtuoso Travel Week.
It was my first time attending, and as our marketing director, I arrived looking at the week through a slightly different lens than most. I wasn’t there to find the next great hotel for a client or learn the intricacies of a new cruise ship. I wanted to understand the industry around us: where luxury travel is going, what our partners are seeing and, perhaps most importantly, where AWT fits into all of it.
Virtuoso Travel Week is difficult to appreciate until you’re standing in the middle of it. This year, attendees from 105 countries gathered for a week of meetings, professional development, networking, and conversations about what’s happening across the world of luxury travel.
For our team, that meant days that started early and ended late. We met with hoteliers, cruise lines, destination management companies, tourism boards, and other travel partners from around the world. We heard about new properties and experiences, talked about where our clients are traveling, and compared notes about how travel itself is changing.
And then there were the matched appointments.
Imagine a ballroom filled with roughly 250 tables arranged in neat rows and columns. A bell chimes, and you sit down across from your first travel partner. You introduce yourselves. Exchange business cards. They tell you about what they represent. You ask questions. Eight minutes later, the bell chimes again. You share a quick thank you, goodbye, and handshake, then navigate the rows to find your next appointment.
We did that 25 times a day for four days.
I sat down with more than 100 travel partners over the course of the week. And somewhere around the second half of day two, I noticed that I’d gotten my introduction down.
“I’m Alicia, the marketing director for our 55-year-old, family-owned travel company in its third generation of leadership. There are 15 of us, about half in our incentive travel division and half in leisure. We’re not a host agency with independent contractors. Our advisors are employees, and we all work very closely together.”
Sometimes I’d mention that our leisure advisors have been with us for about 15 and 20 years and were consistently top performers in Virtuoso. Sometimes I’d talk about the rise we’ve seen in multi-generational travel. Sometimes I’d explain the relationship between Alabama World Travel and Sutton Planning.
But with only a few minutes to introduce our company, I kept coming back to the same things.
We’re family-owned. We’ve been here a long time. We’re small and mighty. And we work as a team.
I spend a lot of time thinking about how to explain what makes AWT different. Apparently, give me 60 seconds and a bell that’s about to ring, and I get much less complicated about it.
Seeing Our Industry Up Close
One thing Virtuoso Travel Week makes very clear is just how enormous and varied the luxury travel industry has become.
I met people from companies of every size and structure. Within the agency world alone, there are businesses operating very differently from ours. Many have grown through host-agency models that support large networks of independent travel advisors. Some have hundreds or even thousands of advisors spread across the country.
What I hadn’t fully appreciated before VTW was how different AWT looks by comparison.
Our advisors are employees. Our marketing, finance, sales, and creative support are in-house. We know one another’s clients. We ask each other questions. We share relationships and information. When someone learns something useful, it is shared with our team.
None of this feels particularly remarkable when you work inside it every day.
Standing among nearly 5,000 people from across our industry, it started to.
It also helped me better understand why longevity within our company matters. AWT has been around since 1971 and is now in its third generation of leadership. Our two leisure advisors, Julie Smothers and Emily Trione, have been with us for more than a decade each, building their own networks of relationships and expertise along the way.
In travel, those relationships matter.
A hotel isn’t simply a hotel when someone on our team knows the people running it. A destination isn’t entirely unfamiliar when another advisor has recently been there. And when a traveler encounters a problem halfway around the world, their advisor isn’t operating on an island.
There is a whole support system behind them.
Bringing a Very Big World Back Home
Of course, Virtuoso Travel Week wasn’t only an exercise in self-reflection.
We came home with notebooks full of ideas and inboxes overflowing with thank-you notes and follow-ups. In the span of a few days:
We got a look at what’s new and what’s next, from major hotel openings and renovations like the multi-billion renovation of the Waldorf Astoria New York.
We strengthened relationships with people we’ve worked with for years, like Carole at IC Bellagio, while meeting new partners like Luke with Conrad Maldives, whom we’re excited to continue getting to know.
We explored how travel itself is changing, from growing interest in experience-driven travel like expedition cruising with National Geographic-Lindblad Expeditions.
We explored hot topics about one of the biggest forces changing nearly every industry right now: artificial intelligence. One statistic from the week stuck with me: 96% of people surveyed were excited about using AI to help plan travel, while only 6% trusted it to actually plan their trip.
Those are just a few examples from a very full week, but they illustrate why our team goes.
Being part of Virtuoso connects AWT to an extraordinary global network. But access alone isn’t what matters. It is knowing how to put that network to work for our clients.
It means knowing which travel partner to call when a trip calls for something exceptional. It means having trusted partners on the ground when plans change. It means bringing decades of relationships, firsthand knowledge and the collective experience of our team to the decisions our clients are trusting us to help them make.
Virtuoso Travel Week gave us a wider view of the industry, but it also reinforced something much closer to home: our clients don’t just have an advisor planning their trip. They have the entire team behind them.
That’s what we want our clients to feel every time they travel with us.