What Luxury Hotels Figured Out About Travel Advisors and Why Vacation Rentals Should Pay Attention
After 25 years in luxury hospitality, I assumed working with travel advisors would be an obvious part of the vacation rental business. It turns out our industry still has some catching up to do.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about travel advisors. I recently joined Rachel Alday on her podcast, The Hospitality Breakroom: Booked Differently, for a conversation called The Untapped Distribution Channel for Vacation Rentals. Next week, I’ll be sitting on a panel with Rachel at VRMA (Vacation Rental Management Association) Conference in Nashville talking about how vacation rental companies and travel advisors can work together more successfully.
Travel advisors have actually been part of our strategy at The Joes from day one, so none of this is particularly new to me. But preparing for these conversations has forced me to step back and ask a question I hadn’t really considered before: Why is the vacation rental industry so far behind the luxury hotel industry when it comes to travel advisors?
For me, working with advisors was a no-brainer. But I’ve realized that I came into this industry with a very different perspective. I’ve spent 25 years in the luxury hotel business, and luxury hotels figured this out a long time ago.
We Already Have a Playbook
At my hotel, the Farmhouse Inn in Sonoma County, travel advisors have been an important part of our business for decades and continue to be today. And when I say important, I don’t mean we simply pay a commission when an advisor happens to send us a guest. We actively invest in the channel.
We are members of Virtuoso and Internova, two major networks connecting professional travel advisors with hotels, cruise lines, tour operators and other travel partners around the world. For a hotel, belonging to networks like these gives you access to advisors who are actively looking for exceptional experiences for their clients. In return, hotels invest in the relationship, provide benefits to those clients and, most importantly, work to earn the advisors’ trust.
Then there is the granddaddy of them all for us: American Express Fine Hotels + Resorts. FHR is invite only and requires participating hotels to provide significant benefits to eligible guests: breakfast for two, property credits, guaranteed late checkout and other perks. Those amenities cost the hotel real money, and we happily participate. Why? Because the business is worth it.
That is the mindset throughout the luxury hotel industry.
The Annual Pilgrimages
Every August, thousands of us make what I jokingly think of as our annual pilgrimage to Las Vegas, in what might be the least appealing time imaginable to visit Las Vegas, for Virtuoso Travel Week. We spend days taking appointments with travel advisors, attending events, hosting dinners, buying drinks, reconnecting with old friends and trying to develop new relationships. It is part sales conference, part reunion and part marathon networking session. And I love it.
Every December, many of us make another pilgrimage, this time to Cannes in the South of France for ILTM, one of the biggest gatherings in luxury travel. Then we essentially do it all over again. And those are just the big ones.
It seems as though almost every month there is another advisor conference, roadshow, sales mission, familiarization trip or event somewhere. Hotels and hotel groups spend enormous amounts of money participating. Advisors are often hosted or heavily subsidized because the entire point is to make it easy for them to experience the product, meet the people behind it and develop the confidence to recommend it to their clients.
There is an entire ecosystem built around these relationships. At most high-end hotels, there is even someone whose job is largely dedicated to this world: a leisure sales manager. Their responsibility is to build relationships with travel advisors and other leisure partners and turn those relationships into room nights.
For years, we also worked with J.MAK, a luxury hospitality representation company founded by my friend Jon Makhmaltchi. Jon may be the most connected person I’ve ever met in the travel advisor world. Companies like J.MAK essentially extend a hotel’s sales team, maintaining relationships with advisors and making sure their hotel partners remain top of mind.
Luxury hotels spend all of this money for a very simple reason: travel advisors send business.
The Relationship Doesn't End With the Reservation
There is another part of this relationship that I think is even more important. When we know a travel advisor has a client staying at Farmhouse Inn, we go out of our way to make sure that guest has an exceptional experience.
If it is an important advisor relationship, we might communicate with the advisor while their client is staying with us just to let them know how things are going. We leave welcome notes for guests from their advisor. We want the handoff to be seamless. From the guest’s perspective, it doesn’t really matter where the advisor’s job stops and ours begins. They just need to feel incredibly well taken care of.
And there is a good business reason for all of this. A direct guest might represent one reservation. A great travel advisor might represent dozens of reservations over many years.
Luxury hotels figured out a long time ago that the advisor isn’t some middleman standing between us and our customer. The advisor is another customer whose trust we need to earn.
That is the playbook I come from, which is why entering the vacation rental industry has been so surprising.
Why Aren’t We Using the Same Playbook?
One of the things that has struck me since entering the vacation rental world is how little crossover I see from luxury hotels. I’ve met countless property managers, real estate professionals, marketers and entrepreneurs in this business, from small mom-and-pop operators to some of the largest companies in the industry. Very rarely do I encounter people who built their careers in luxury hotels.
To me, that’s a missed opportunity, because we’re essentially in the same business. We’re putting heads in beds. We’re selling an experience built around a place to live for some period of time. We’re trying to create demand, maximize occupancy and rate, deliver exceptional hospitality, solve problems when they arise and ultimately create an experience someone wants to come back to.
Luxury hotels have spent decades figuring out how to do these things. Why wouldn’t we use the same playbook? Travel advisors may be one of the clearest examples.
Some of the Stereotypes Have Surprised Me
Preparing for our VRMA panel has been eye-opening because we’ve spent a surprising amount of time addressing some pretty fundamental misconceptions about what travel advisors actually do: that they’re order takers, that they simply book a trip the customer has already selected, that they’re an unnecessary middleman, that an advisor booking takes away a reservation the property could have gotten directly, or that their clients are more demanding.
The reality looks very different. A modern advisor is often much closer to a consultant than an order taker. They learn about the client, research and vet the options, narrow hundreds of possibilities down to the handful that actually fit, manage details and remain involved before, during and after the trip. That’s exactly the distinction we’re discussing at VRMA Panel Presentation
And this is hardly some tiny corner of the travel business. Research I did for the panel puts roughly one in four U.S. travel dollars through the travel agency channel. More than half of advisors charge a professional fee, which I think says something important about how the profession has evolved: clients are willing to pay for expertise, research and advice.
For anyone trying to reach affluent travelers, that’s an awfully significant audience to ignore.
So How Did Vacation Rentals Get So Far Behind?
The more I’ve thought about this, the more I believe there’s a reasonable explanation. For most of its history, the vacation rental industry has been incredibly fragmented.
There are thousands of individual homeowners, realtors and regional property managers representing wonderful homes. But historically there haven’t been many large, recognizable luxury vacation rental brands. Instead, much of the industry’s growth happened through large online marketplaces. They solved an enormous distribution problem by giving individual homes access to millions of travelers.
But that created a very different ecosystem from the one that developed around luxury hotels. Think about what a great hotel brand does. A traveler doesn’t have to independently establish trust in every Four Seasons before making a reservation. The name itself carries a promise. Travel advisors benefit from that same trust.
I think we’re beginning to see the early stages of something similar happening in luxury vacation rentals. Some companies are assembling larger portfolios of professionally managed luxury homes. At The Joes, we’re approaching the opportunity somewhat differently by creating a curated marketplace of exceptional second homes, but we’re all part of a broader evolution.
Vacation rentals are starting to become brands. And that should create an enormous opportunity with travel advisors.
What’s surprising to me is how few companies seem to be taking advantage of it.
The World Has Changed
Fifteen or twenty years ago, I might have argued that the big brands needed to go first. That’s largely how it happened in hotels. The major luxury hotel companies had the resources to build dedicated leisure sales teams, participate in advisor networks, attend events around the world and invest heavily in these relationships. Smaller independent hotels like Farmhouse Inn could learn from that playbook and eventually compete alongside them.
But the world is different today.
Travel advisors are more accessible than they have ever been. They’re easier to find, many have built meaningful audiences of their own, and social media has blurred the line between advisor, tastemaker and influencer. Even advisors who wouldn’t describe themselves as influencers are often trusted voices within their own communities and networks.
At the same time, the advisor world itself is evolving. Fora may be one of the most interesting examples. It has lowered the barriers to entering the profession, embraced technology and AI behind the scenes, and brought a new generation of people into the business. In a remarkably short period of time, it has also become a meaningful source of business for luxury hotels.
I think that challenges the assumption that travel advisors are some legacy distribution channel slowly being replaced by technology. We may actually be seeing the opposite. Technology is making it easier for advisors to build businesses, serve clients efficiently and expand their reach.
And that means you don’t need to be a giant hotel company anymore to build meaningful relationships in this world.
Yet, from what I’ve seen, much of the vacation rental industry still isn’t doing it.
It’s Part of The Joes DNA
At The Joes, travel advisors aren’t an experiment we’re considering or a channel we’re waiting for someone else to prove. They’ve been part of our strategy from day one.
That’s partly because of the luxury hotel experience I bring to The Joes. I’ve seen firsthand what happens when you invest in these relationships over time. I know how much trust matters, how powerful the right introduction can be, and how valuable an advisor becomes when they understand your product and feel confident putting their client in your hands.
We’re building The Joes with that knowledge already baked in.
We invest in the travel advisor community. We build relationships with advisors. We make our homes easy for them to understand and recommend. And we’ve built travel planning and concierge into our model because we know that the home itself is only one part of delivering the kind of experience an advisor wants for a client.
I believe this will become one of the most important ways travelers discover The Joes.
And for homeowners considering putting their home on The Joes, I think that’s an important distinction. Our job isn’t simply to build a beautiful listing and hope someone finds it. Our job is to create demand for these homes and reach customers in places individual homeowners—and even many property managers, simply can’t reach on their own.
Travel advisors are one of those places.
Trust May Matter Even More With a Home
There’s another reason I think the advisor opportunity could ultimately be even more important for vacation rentals. Booking a private home can feel risky.
Hotels have brands, standards, front desks, thousands of reviews and a relatively predictable experience. Homes are individual. Beautiful photographs don’t always tell you that the fourth bedroom isn’t appropriate for an adult. They don’t tell you whether the neighborhood is right for your family. They don’t tell you whether the house that looks spectacular online actually feels spectacular when you walk through the door.
That’s where curation and trust become enormously valuable. It’s also one of the reasons we’ve built The Joes the way we have. We don’t want to simply put thousands of houses online. We want to know the homes, understand what makes each one special, be transparent about what someone should know before booking it, and then surround the stay with travel planning and concierge support.
Where I Think This Is Going
I believe the next generation of luxury vacation rentals will look a lot more like the best of luxury hospitality. Not because homes should become hotels, they shouldn’t, but because the things luxury hotels have spent decades perfecting still matter: trust, curation, relationships, service and knowing how to reach the right traveler.
That thinking is deeply embedded in what we’re building at The Joes. We’re not trying to become another website with thousands of homes and endless search results. We’re building a trusted collection of exceptional second homes, and then creating the relationships, service and distribution around those homes that help the right people discover them.
Travel advisors are a big part of that. They have been from day one.
For homeowners, that means we’re doing much more than putting your home online and waiting for someone to find it. We’re actively building ways to introduce it to an entirely different world of travelers.
For travel advisors, it means we want to be the partner you can call when your client says, “I don’t want a hotel this time. I want to live somewhere incredible for a month.”
And for travelers, it means something even simpler: you shouldn’t have to choose between the privacy and space of an exceptional home and the confidence, service and trust you expect from a great luxury hotel.
That, ultimately, is what we’re building at The Joes.
And maybe that's the lesson I've carried with me from 25 years in the hotel business: luxury isn't just about the place you stay. It's about knowing you're in good hands.
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