Hickory Sees Demand Swell, Signs of Easing Blended Travel

Hickory's Chris Dane discusses:

• Signs of slowing in "blended travel"
• Why needs for contact center services will be long-term
• Partners' cautious approach to New Distribution Capability adoption

Travel agency consortium Hickory Global Partners has had an eventful 2023, starting off the year with the launch of a new contact center business followed by its acquisition by host travel agency InteleTravel, under which Hickory continues to operate as its own independent unit. Hickory president and managing partner Chris Dane spoke recently with BTN executive editor Michael B. Baker for an update on both those milestones as well as the travel recovery progress among its partners, which include corporate travel agencies and travel departments.

BTN: How is the acquisition progressing?

Chris Dane: The InteleTravel acquisition is going well. We've integrated legal, we've integrated HR and some shared service as well. We'll be working on branding. We've already coordinated marketing. The blended travel is a heavy lift, and we haven't really gotten into integrating some of the InteleTravel leisure projects for our members. These are all things we want to do, but everybody's so busy and travel is so strong that we're behind the eight ball of where we want to be at this point.

BTN: What are your partners seeing in terms of recovery?

Dane: We've been running above 2019 since about May or mid-June in total hotel bookings. I can finally say we will never talk about 2019 again. We have data through August at this point. Based on data that we've seen, there's been no hangover from the summer travel. It has continued in September thus far. I don't know how much of an impact the auto strike will have, but short of that, we're really comfortable where the growth has been. There's been a resurgence. There was a big back-to-office movement June 1 and another big movement after Labor Day, and you can see all that in the bookings, and it's encouraging. Airline growth, we're performing better this year than we did in 2019. It's very positive and very bullish despite talk of recession and high interest rates. 

Travel is in a very different category today than it was in 2019, in corporate and leisure. There's much greater importance on the corporate side in the need to have in-person meetings and conferences. On the leisure side, travel is a God-given right now. They'll forgo other expenditures, furniture and that type of thing, so they can have experiences. I was concerned going into September what would happen after Labor Day, and through most of the month, my concerns were not well-founded. In the first 20 days of the month at [U.S. Transportation Security Administration security lane passenger counts], for example, 11 of those days have been above 2019. 

One of the concerns we have is we're seeing a decline in what appears to be blended travel. Nobody really knows how to measure blended travel. The hotels will tell you they measure it by day of arrival—so Thursday-Friday and Sunday-Monday—and that has seemingly fallen off a little bit and gone back to the more traditional Monday-Tuesday or midweek arrivals.

BTN: What sort of adoption have you seen with your contact center business?

Dane: We launched it because our advisory board said nobody does it well, and you need some more competition. Interestingly enough, we started down on that journey right before Covid and obviously abandoned that. We're doing a bunch of work for a number of MICE companies—we handled some reservations—and that was a piece of business I did not anticipate. 

We're doing a couple of things, for example, for travel management companies. In one case, they needed a dedicated for agent for one of their accounts. It's more than just the traditional after-hours, but the traditional after-hours is running 97 percent answer time within two minutes. So, that's been really good. We're really encouraged by it and the success that it's had thus far. Everyone on the [advisory] board says there's still a real problem with finding people. They still have their staffing problem, and it doesn’t seem to be going away.

BTN: What level of NDC adoption are you seeing among your partners?

Dane: That's still running, from my advisory board at least, in very small numbers, slightly below what ARC is running, so it's a small piece of the business. They're looking at it, but they're still using the traditional [global distribution system] and avoiding the NDC rates. They all agree it's coming, but that is one we're watching to see where it goes.

BTN: You recently published data indicating that Houston and Orlando are emerging as "corporate travel hubs." What's driving that?

Dane: There are several things going on. Florida has had a whole influx and is almost as business-friendly as Texas, and I think that's what's driving a lot of it. The overall growth in those areas is what's driving the growth in those cities being so popular. We're basically corporate-focused, so when you see Orlando, they have a lot of conferences there obviously, and conferences are back above '19 from all indications that we see. You look at cities like Austin, all sorts of businesses have moved there, and the Charlotte area. They're hubs and business-friendly.