In addition to the success of the Internova SNAP program launched less than a year ago, Travel Leaders Network (TLN) shared a slew of tech updates at a recent travel trade media conference in New York City.
“There are many moving parts of Travel Leaders Network,” said John Lovell, TLN president, in a prepared statement. “In 2024 and moving into 2025, we invested heavily into many of our programs, especially Agent Profiler and TravelLeaders.com, Agent Universe and education.” The travel agency network also beefed-up is cruise programs, including Cruise Complete, Empower Cruise, Distinctive Voyages, Amenity Departure Dates and the Culinary Collection.
New SuperAgent Designations
Agent Profiler is Travel Leaders Network’s lead-generation platform, serving the consumer-facing TravelLeaders.com. Helping to achieve the record sales numbers seen by the network in 2024, Agent Profiler last year delivered over 300,000 leads (a 17 percent increase from 2023) in North America, leading to 68,750 bookings, $733 million in sales (an average of $10,665) and $110 million in member commissions. At the same time, Travel Leaders Network saw a 36 percent increase in agent profiles created, as well as a 55 percent increase in new SuperAgent designations.
What’s more impressive than the volume of leads, said Stephen McGillivray, chief marketing officer of Travel Leaders Group, is their quality. “These are bottom-of-the-funnel leads. These are consumers looking for help, looking for an advisor,” he said.
“We play bottom of the funnel, and playing at the bottom of the funnel generates leads where that consumer is well on their way to transacting. So, when they connect with that retailer, they've done their homework. And that's the beautiful thing, because our members are not getting tire-kickers here on these leads; they're getting people that have done research [and] they're looking for help.”
As for the SuperAgent program, it was launched in 2022 and gives Agent Profiler’s most prolific users a profile badge and are boosted to the top of search results. SuperAgents are required to have a certain number of published reviews, photos, bios, travel stories and maps. New for 2025, however, Travel Leaders Network is adding multiple tiers to this program: SuperAgent, SuperAgent Gold and SuperAgent Diamond. To reach these new ranks, members will have performance metrics to meet, such as lead dashboard completion, a 24-hour response rate, a sales close rate and strong rating and review qualities.
The goal of this performance-based program, TLN says, is to enhance the traveler experience by displaying higher quality profiles and building trust with the customer. “This is going to reward agents for not only providing the content criteria that we've laid out for SuperAgent in the past, but also rewarding the agents that are the bestsellers,” said Cory Voss, chief information officer at Travel Leaders Network. “So, you close more of the leads that are coming through this $750 million pipeline, you will have a better opportunity to receive more leads.”
TLN Goes CRM-Agnostic
In separate news, McGillivray said TLN will be going CRM-agnostic, aligning with third-party solutions beyond ClientBase and Tres. The first of these new options is Vacationcrm.
“The CRM landscape in our industry has exploded over the last several years and there's so many options,” said Voss, “and our members have an opportunity to make a choice of picking a CRM from the more basic ones to ones that are more of an elaborate kind of system.” He added: “This is going to be, I think, a gamechanger.”
This CRM-agnostic API will also allow for TLN to extract client info/past purchase history (along with other insights) from its member agencies without them needing to manually upload. This will enable Travel Leaders Network to be smarter marketers, explained McGillivray.
Currently, Voss estimated, that there are about six to 10 reliable third-party CRMs available that TLN wants to partner with, with more likely to continue popping up.
Cruise-Booking Tools
Most notably on the cruise front, Travel Leaders Network has made 36 different enhancements to Cruise Complete, the network’s cruise-booking tool with access to 21 suppliers, over the past year. “It has really been met with a lot of fanfare,” said Voss.
Travel Leaders Network COO Lindsay Pearlman also spoke about the new “horsepower” the network has given Empower Cruise, its program designed to boost commission earnings on cruise sales. This, Pearlman said, “is not for everybody.” The way it works is if a travel advisor is earning the lowest commission level with a cruise line, they can instead book through Empower and take advantage of TLN’s higher commission tier.
“If you are a big seller and a top-level commission producer for Royal [Caribbean], you don't want to book your business through Empower Cruise. But if you do one or two bookings or three or four bookings with a cruise line that you're going to earn 10 percent on, let's say, the suggestion is put it through Empower Cruise and you'll earn 40 percent more using that platform because it books on our credentials and we manage that booking as a result,” explained Pearlman.
In addition, Travel Leaders Network said it will continue to offer its Amenity Departure Dates, Distinctive Voyages and Culinary Collection.
In all? “The secret sauce for us is for [the members] to adopt the tools we give them,” said McGillivray.
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