Welcome to Selling Luxury, the podcast produced by the editors of Luxury Travel Advisor. This series inspires and educates travel advisors who want to enter the luxury arena and provides great insights for those advisors who are already successful in this niche.
In this episode, Ruth Terrero speaks with Jack Ezon, founder and managing partner of Embark, on all luxury trends and how to get to know your luxury clients better.
Clients are becoming a lot more sophisticated, according to Ezon, so advisors must really become specialists in their customers. “Travel is just one word in a sentence that is their private lifestyle. To be able to gain confidence and trust and build that relationship, we need to speak to them about their private life,” he says.
To help advisors grow their business and learn more about their clients, Embark has launched a series of programs—one of which being Embark Academy in partnership with Master Connection Associates (who created training programs for the likes of The Ritz-Carlton, Four Seasons, Aman, Belmond and Mandarin Oriental). “We take a core value of ours, and we activate it and focus on it every day, where we can improve, where we're doing great, where our gap and gain is,” Ezon tells us. “It's been amazing for team building and to focus everybody on what we really are about.”
Ezon also touches upon several hot trends: Wellness and sustainability. In his words, “The challenge with wellness is that it's an overused word, and it's starting to haunt us all because it's being used irresponsibly.” As for sustainability? “Everyone loves to talk about sustainability … [but] I think we need to understand the contribution to sustainability that travel has, on the benefit and the drawback and where that fits into everything else and where we can really drive smart change and smart decisions.”
Also touched upon in the conversation are some of the destinations that are trending for 2020 (Arabic countries, we hear), a couple of Ezon’s favorite “overlooked cities” and more. Take a listen!
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