Tour Cos. Target Meetings

<H1> Tour Cos. Target Meetings</H1>By Maria Lenhart

<B>T</B>wo California-based tour wholesalers-one a well-known pioneer in the Hawaii leisure market and the other a Northern California wine-country specialist-are seeking out meetings and incentive business.

Pleasant Hawaiian Holidays owner Ed Hogan, widely considered the founding father of mass-market leisure tourism to Hawaii, recently announced that he plans a "major assault on group business for Hawaii in 1996" with new packages and a new marketing strategy geared for the meetings and incentive market.

Meanwhile, Carol Tait, owner of a tour company called A Taste of California, said she quadrupled her meeting and incentive business last year and plans to make it an even bigger priority in the months ahead.

Both developments are unusual in that tour wholesalers are nearly always leisure-focused companies with little involvement in the meeting and incentive market. "If there is a trend for tour wholesalers to get into the meetings and incentives area, we're not aware of it," said Linda Kundell, spokeswoman for the United States Tour Operators Association in New York.

But with travel agencies-the primary client base for tour wholesalers-increasingly turning to meeting and incentive business as a source of income, some industry experts believe there could be a trend on the way.

"I've definitely heard jungle drums out there about wholesalers wanting to get into the meetings and incentive business," said Louise Hall-Reider, director of meetings and incentive management for BTI Americas and president of the Society of Incentive Travel Executives.

And Bruce Tepper, an incentive industry consultant in San Francisco, believes that tour operators expanding into the realm can find a ready market among their travel agency clients.

"The time is really right for it; commission caps are driving agents into this business," he said. "Since the agents already know the wholesalers, they would get a lot of agency business." It already is a common practice in Europe, he noted.

Pleasant Hawaiian Holidays, which has built a strong travel agent client base since setting up shop in Westlake Village, Calif., in 1959, is marketing its meetings and incentive services to travel agents. But corporations and incentive houses also are important markets, said director of corporate communications Ken Phillips.

"With so many companies downsizing, we saw a real need to take the administrative grunt work, such as making air and hotel arrangements, off their hands," said Phillips.

Although Pleasant Hawaiian first delved into the meetings side three years ago, it only recently has made group business a major focus. The company hopes to increase group travel from 10 percent of its business now to 25 percent by the end of 1996, said Hogan.

Meanwhile, A Taste of California is a small tour operator that provides a full gamut of services for corporate groups, including air, hotel, meeting space, limousine service, activities, theme parties and meal functions."We've found tremendous demand nationwide from companies who want someone to handle everything in setting up a wine-country meeting," Tait said.

Among her clients is Syllabus Press, a San Jose-based publisher of high-tech magazines that recently hired A Taste of California to arrange a technology conference for 1,000 attendees from all over the United States. "They can handle details that we don't have the time or resources for," said Syllabus Press conference organizer John Noon.

But not everyone is eager to see tour operators enter the meetings and incentive realm, particularly when they are large mass-market wholesalers like Pleasant Hawaiian.

"Although I'm a big supporter of travel agents getting a place in the meetings and incentive food chain, a red flag goes up when I hear of wholesalers offering to handle the hotel and air arrangements," said Hall-Reider. "The big question in my mind is one of control, particularly when it comes to air ticketing. Can you maintain the same control over air arrangements and last-minute changes when it's in someone else's hands?"

"An incentive is much more of a first-class, labor-intensive item than most tour operators are equipped to deal with," said Rich Wise, co-owner of a small San Diego incentive house called How Wise. "Yes, they have airline and hotel clout, but any good incentive house can negotiate its own favorable fares and rates.