Tzell Travel Group Eyes Europe After Acquisitions Broaden Domestic Reach

Tzell Travel Group continues to make acquisitions in the United States and aims to add its first overseas operation following a planned United Kingdom acquisition later this year.

Already part of the Radius travel management company network, Tzell's planned acquisition in the United Kingdom—the details of which officials would not disclose—should generate more interest from larger multinational accounts, in addition to its current multinational clients, including ING, the New York Stock Exchange and the Moet Hennessy-Louis Vuitton Group, said senior vice president Jerry Behrens.

"The biggest change for Tzell going forward is getting larger RFPs from larger corporations, stuff we never pursued in the past and may have even shunned. But now that it's happening so much and we've done a couple and are handling them very well, we are going to start moving into the larger client market," he said.

Many of Tzell's more than 2,200 corporate accounts are in the entertainment, fashion and music industries, including the William Morris Agency, Bad Boy Entertainment, Escada and the New York Giants. As such, London is the most logical foreign market to move into, said Tzell vice president of sales and business development David Holyoke. "We handle both in New York and Los Angeles a lot of entertainment and financial business and we really need to be in London," Behrens said. "I don't know if there is any other city that I could say that about today."

In June 2006, Tzell became the agency of record for the New York Stock Exchange, which recently began further globalizing its travel program to Tokyo, India and Europe due to recent equity acquisitions in regional stock markets there. "We need support on global issues and harmonizing NYSE and the Euronext stock exchange as far as a travel perspective goes," said Richard Dowling, director of purchasing for the NYSE, which has approximately 1,000 travelers in its program.

New York-based Tzell's 2006 acquisitions of Nashville, Tenn.-based Sailair and New Jersey-based companies World Travel and Landesman Travel accounted for a combined $18 million in Airlines Reporting Corp. sales. In 2006, Tzell's total ARC sales, which account for nearly all of its air transactions, grew by more than 9 percent.

Since December, Tzell has acquired two "corporate-focused" travel management companies in Los Angeles, one agency in central Washington and one in Long Island. The acquisitions allowed the company to merge its Tzell West office, which has been operating for 18 years, and increased ARC sales in the region from approximately $30 million to more than $90 million.

"Tzell wasn't necessarily on the radar as much as it should have been in California, and bringing those two operations in and then consolidating it attracted a lot of attention. It's an area we have a lot of interest in growing further," Holyoke said.

In 2007, the company will surpass 25 domestic locations and still is looking at further acquisitions in markets including San Diego, Chicago and Miami. "To build the West Coast is important. Then, we will start to look at some places in other parts of the country, specifically in the Southeastern U.S.," Holyoke said.

Increasing its footprint over the next few months will continue to be a driver of new business for the company, according to Holyoke. "The amount of unsolicited RFPs that we get has skyrocketed," Holyoke said. "We are in the face of a lot more customers and our conversion rate has been a lot more successful."