In Search Of The Big Surprise

For those out there who believe that Vision Travel is only about corporate travel, you may want to have a bit of a chat with Lynda Sinclair, vice-president, leisure travel for Vision, who admits that this is a pretty common misconception about the company, reports Bob Mowat in this week’s digital edition of Canadian Travel Press.

“I run into this all the time,” Sinclair said, observing that people “do think of Vision as a very corporate company and they really don’t understand how leisure fits into it. But five minutes on the phone with me and they get it.”

What they get is that of the $700 million that Vision will generate in 2017, one-third of that will be from its leisure travel business, although that shouldn’t be surprising when you consider the company’s origins.

“How does leisure fit,” asks Sinclair, “ Lots of different ways. That’s where the roots of the company are. We’re a third generation travel company that started as a leisure company in 1953 on Yonge Street [in Toronto] and it was leisure travel that we sold.”

And she continues: “Most of us, funny enough, started in leisure as good old, front-line agents. So again, once we start talking to people we kind of exude that; we understand it [leisure travel]; we get it.”

Not only does Vision get it, but as Sinclair explains it, the company’s corporate and leisure businesses “play off one another.”
“The airline contracts that are around that we have because of the corporate millions of dollars that we do, the leisure advisors get to benefit from that. The hotel programs that we have at the different levels,

the leisure advisors get to book into those rates. And then the high end – the high end leisure stuff – the Four Seasons, the Peninsulas, the Mandarins – often the corporate executives are staying in those as well as our luxury travellers – so we move up the ladder with better commissions, better amenities, really fast because we’re combining $700 million worth of sales into all those different areas.”

For the full story, check out this week’s digital edition of Canadian Travel Press.