USA Aussie Specialists Linda Smith and Christine Meny and US Wholesaler Tammy Lindsay chat with the Mole at ATE 2006
The Mole joined Linda Smith from San Francisco and Christine Meny from Fairfield California, both Aussie Specialist Agents and Tammy Lindsay from Springboard in Los Angeles for a chat at ATE 2006 and they all said ATE 2006 was excellent and very helpful.
Linda and Christine said that it was absolutely fabulous to be able to speak with all these operators and wholesalers at ATE 2006 in Adelaide and really get to know them, because our clients are looking for experiences, so they expect us to know the destination and the more options we can give them the better.
We always have to remember that we are in the business of fulfilling fantasies and that means to achieve that we need information and that is what the Aussie Specialist Programme does for us.
Generally, we gain information from educational programmes or Corroboree, which is normally held in the USA and is much smaller and you tend not to get smaller companies at Corroboree as only the larger companies can afford to do it. They have limited slots so you see everybody. It will be interesting to see what happens in Corroboree this year as it is in Cairns.
We hope that there will be smaller operators in Cairns and that it will be a similar format to ATE as this has worked and in Cairns we would like to see more of what we were not able to see here.
We will have had 99 appointments by the end of ATE and even those that are not overly relevant are OK because we may use that information.
The biggest frustration is not being able to see people we want to see, but we have seen many more suppliers here than all the Corroborees.
We have been in the programme since ’98 and ’99 and there are over 130 Aussie Specialist Premier agents in USA and Canada who were invited to submit to attend ATE. 50 submitted in the US and 15 were chosen. The people that went last year cannot come this year and so on.
Clients are also educating themselves and while they can get general ideas off the web, they soon realise that they can’t do this on their own and can’t get the answers. It is often very confusing for them and of course we use the TA site and resources and also we have pretty well completed all of the state programmes.
Tammy is an upper end wholesaler, specialising in selling upmarket B&B’s lodges and packages, with 50% self drive but a number wanting chauffeurs or drivers.
She says that working with Tourism Australia is a great marketing tool for her and she says that they are great at coming up with ideas and then she pulls it all together, package and price, to take to market.
ATE has been great for us and I have found lots of new product and new experiences.
Tammy’s clients are looking for the “wow” factor and are looking for something unique and different, often having been recommended something by others and want to include that in their Aus programme.
Report by John Alwyn-Jones from ATE 2006
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