Exclusive interview: What makes Tourico Holidays so successful?

eTN had the opportunity to sit down and talk with Amir Kalmar, the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) for Tourico Holidays in Altamonte Springs, Florida.

For 21 years, Tourico Holidays has been a growing global travel brokerage company. Directly contracting with travel providers, such as hotel chains, cruise lines, attractions, and more, Tourico Holidays works on a high-volume, wholesale model to broker this inventory to international businesses using proprietary technology. Through global distribution, unique opportunities and cutting-edge technology, Tourico Holidays aims to provide its customers with incremental growth while lowering the cost of transactions.

In 1994, the company’s CEO, Uri Argov, and his wife took their entire savings of $19,000 and started Tourico Holidays from their walk-in closet at home. Today, this same entrepreneurial spirit and passion is embedded in the foundation of Tourico Holidays and is what drives its innovation and exponential growth.

The travel business is a 1.3 trillion dollar business. Since that initial investment 21 years ago, Tourico Holidays has grown 200-300% a year into a $1+ billion company. From one office in Sanford, Florida, the company has expanded to 30+ offices worldwide on 5 continents with 650 employees and counting. Today, Tourico Holidays provides support to 4,900 clients across 100 countries, using the most innovative technology in the business-to-business travel arena. Demand is matched with a robust travel supply spanning 4,500 destinations globally. The company’s growth year in the last 3 years is an astounding 56%, and its website receives 268 million searches a day.

eTN: What is the secret to your success, and what are you doing that is different from other companies?

AMIR KALMAR: Our main success is our people are first.

Second, is our business model. We currently sell 36,000 hotels worldwide. We started as an inbound operator to the US and expanded in 2007 to Europe, and now have more than 30 office locations worldwide.

Out of the 36,000 hotel clients, we pick the best performing hotels and prepay a large room blog in advance for a fixed rate. For example at the Grand Hyatt New York, we have 260 hotel rooms prepaid at any time. This allows us to be competitive and do our own calculation.

We are not going after established clients for our partner hotels, like Expedia for example would be doing it. We give them added value, and they love it.

Let me give you an example – we exclusively handle all travel for Sam’s Club with 54 million members. This gives us an enormous buying power. Our clients are wholesalers, tour operators, travel companies, point systems, etc.

eTN: Do you sell anything besides hotels, like tours?

KALMAR: Yes, we just got into activities and prepaid attraction tickets in London or New York, for example the Freedom Tower in NY.

eTN: How do you keep track of it all?

KALMAR: Good question. In 2003, we established our own technology company in Israel. It keeps track of everything, including inventory. For example, before we decide to prepay hotel rooms at a property, we already know how they are performing. We know every business aspect of our company at any minute. So prepaying rooms is a very calculated risk for us.

eTN: Do you handle air reservations?

KALMAR: Absolutely not. We don’t want to get into the airline business. They do their own thing with zero commission – we stay far away from it and wish them luck.

eTN: Are your people working freelance or are they employed?

KALMAR: All our people are employed. Currently we have 30+ locations around the world and more than 700 employees.

eTN: How do you train your people?

KALMAR: We have our own way. In the beginning, we recruited people from other companies, but we soon found out, many are good people, but they don’t think the Tourico way.

So we took 3,000 square meters of office space in our Florida headquarters, hired a professional recruiter, and rented 20+ apartments in the neighborhood of our office.

We used the space to start our own academy and teach people from scratch. Among our teachers is our CEO himself. We tout absolute priority in our academy.

We have a 90% retention rate of those graduating and then working for Tourico.

For example this gentlemen here (he pointed to a man next to him) is from Sweden. He doesn’t look Swedish, because he emigrated as a kid from Kurdistan. He graduated and is now in our Dubai office.

We invested 5 million into the academy, and our people are motivated. We plan to have our 750th person graduating from our academy in 2018.

eTN: Tourico certainly has its own style. Thanks for your time.

KALMAR: Thank you.