“Take the road no one else went down”: Collette CEO on the future of group tours

“Take the road no one else went down”: Collette CEO on the future of group tours

ATTN all agents! We’ve got some really, really good news for you.

If you make a 2019 booking with Collette, you’ll score yourself a $50 Coles Myer or Wish gift card – no strings attached.

Yep, we’re serious. You’ll also get a $25 gift card for every additional booking, and every booking made goes into a draw to win a $1000 gift card in December!

You have until November 30 to get those 2019 bookings in, so we’d hop to it if we were you.

November 30 also happens to be the date of the Australian Travel Awards! And did we mention that Collette is one of our sponsors for the inaugural gala night? We couldn’t be more excited to celebrate the myriad of companies that make this industry so damn amazing – and there’s less than three weeks to go!

Grab some last minute tickets here while they last and check out the website for more info.

But now, back to Collette.

They’ve recently relaunched their Explorations tour offering, and boy do they look good.

One particular tour that stands out to Collette CEO, Dan Sullivan, is the Finland Northern Lights Experience, which he told Travel Weekly, has truly taken off.

“We launched it last winter but it’s really just beginning now, and it’s taken off because on one day you can stay in an igloo, go dog sledding and see the Northern Lights – all together,” he said.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eczs9foORlY&feature=youtu.be

The maximum number of guests on the renewed and refreshed Explorations tours is 19 – considerably smaller than Collette’s Classic tours, which max out at 44.

“It’s small, immersive, it’s doing things that you couldn’t do if you had a big group,” Sullivan said.

Another tour that stands out is one that travels almost completely by rail in Switzerland, visiting family wineries that are unknown to the average traveller.

“It really is so cool and so real, going into the back where you’re not in a tourist destination, you’re kind of exploring. And that’s what we do as a company, we go out and we find things that are different.

“And yes you’ve got to do the must see’s, people love that, but really there aren’t too many companies who are doing everything by rail, and in Switzerland, it’s the best way to see it,” Sullivan added.

By relaunching Explorations, the 100-year-old company has breathed new life into its itineraries – adding new and different accommodation options, diverse transport options and newer, exciting experiences.

Collette’s Head of Marketing, James Hewlett, said that relaunching Explorations has given the tours their own identity.

“They were kind of hidden within our core program, now we’ve really brought it out, giving it its own identity,” he said.

“The product team also went through every itinerary hour by hour to check on the immersive experiences that are going to be presented and the inclusions and so there were a few changes made so that some of the tours have been very successful over the last five to 10 years are now represented with additional features.”

However, although Collette’s Explorations offering is now focussed on smaller groups, Sullivan doesn’t think travellers will choose small group tours exclusively going forward.

“I see Explorations being huge, and we’ve had great, tremendous growth in it. It really grew last year, I want to say 57 per cent, because that’s what [people] want,” he said.

“But in saying that – even talking about size – no matter what, when people are wanting to travel with Collette they’re looking at the destination and what they do in immersive travel.”

Collette has specialty product designers and buyers on the ground in each destination they visit – something Sullivan did in Australia for almost two decades and believes is an important part of being a successful travel company.

“That’s what we try to add: expertise. It’s not that other companies don’t have it, but to find that you have to be the person creating it and buying it, but a lot of people buy from third-party providers,” he said.

“And that’s kind of what we try to create as a company and certainly with that amazing growth we’ve done it better and better every year. That’s why we have designers on the ground designing things.

“They research it, then we have buyers to make sure we buy direct so that we’re competitive that we offer the best value for money. And that’s what we feel we do the best, we offer the best value for money,” Sullivan added.

But it’s not just great value for money that make up Collette: it’s finding out what travellers most want to do – and according to Sullivan, it’s more often than not the road less travelled.

“You come to a fork in the road and that’s the best part. You want to take the road that no one else went down,” he said.

“When you go to Switzerland and you go out in the country, you’re going back in time, way in the 1800s, and people want that. They want to go back, and everyone wants something new but how often can you go back in time? You can almost everywhere in the world if you know where to go.”

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