Luxury Travel Advisor - December 2008 - (Page 41) corporate CEOs in the country. In order to maintain this elite client roster, DeClemente and Yellin launched a marketing concept called the “Courtyard Club,” in which they outlined “a special series of benefits that are available to our very prestigious and demanding clients.” These benefits were available to Courtyard Travel through relationships it already enjoyed with suppliers, as well as via the affiliation it formed with Tzell Travel in October 2007. Joining such a large travel company provided Courtyard Travel with the opportunity to make more money on air travel, as well as on hotels, cruises and tours. Additionally, Tzell’s membership in the Signature Travel Network provides the agency with additional benefits, such as its hotels amenity program. All of these “perks” have been compiled into a Courtyard Club marketing piece that’s distributed to existing customers who are invited to join free of charge; it’s also used as a tool to present to potential clients. “We took all of our services and put them into written form,” says DeClemente. “We recapped our airline benefits, describing that we have programs where we can provide complimentary upgrades. We recapped what we can do with hotels, such as early check-in and late check-out and complimentary breakfast.” Seeking out new opportunities through cross marketing is a specialty of DeClemente’s. A notable past success includes working with BMW and Neiman Marcus to fulfill the travel portion of a consumer promotion advertised in the luxury department store’s Christmas catalogue, which always includes over-the-top gifts. In 2007, the offer was a special limited-edition BMW M6 convertible that was put on the marketplace for $146,000. “When the phone lines opened up, all 50 cars sold in 92 seconds,” says DeClemente. The purchase also included the opportunity for the buyers to take delivery of the cars in Munich, Germany. Enter Courtyard Travel, which worked with the new auto owners to arrange their travel programs. “We took two groups over and wined and dined them. They loved it,” says DeClemente. The initiative gave Courtyard Travel access to some very affluent consumers whom, afterward, they continued to target. “It gave us an opportunity to build a base of customers who have now purchased cruises and safaris from us. One request was, ‘I’ve never been to Hawaii. Can you put something together for me and my three kids?’ They stayed in a triplex on the beach in Maui,” he says. Working with top brands has been a continuing initiative for Courtyard Travel. “We’ve been doing this for quite some time,” says DeClemente. “We try to affiliate with companies whose names have great cachet, that have the marketing power that we don’t have. What we bring to the relationship is our travel expertise.” Courtyard Travel recently did some marketing, literally in its own backyard, when it hosted a South Africa consumer night for tenants in its building on Northern Boulevard in Great Neck. Not a bad idea, considering the address is home to a number of banks and financial companies. The agency brought in South African wine and food and invited Micato Safaris in as its featured supplier. In another instance, the agency hosted a dessert party for the building’s tenants at an onsite café. It called the event “Dessert’s on Us” and invited several cruise lines to participate and help share the expense of the desserts “so that we weren’t ridiculously out of pocket,” says DeClemente. “It stimulated a lot of traffic.” For the pending holiday season, he and Yellin are considering hosting a wine party for these same fortunate tenants. “Whether it’s with brands like Neiman and BMW or lower key promotions, we’re always out there trying to drum up some business,” says DeClemente. “Sheila and I have a standard joke: ‘Do you have your business cards with you today?’” With such high-end customers, Yellin is a big believer in touching the customer in personal ways. It’s a practice she insists her agents—who have a wealth of experience and their own loyal clientele—engage in. “It’s very important,” she says. “I want a telephone call. I want a note. At holiday times if they haven’t heard from a client, I COURTYARD TRAVEL Location: Great Neck, NY President & CEO: Sheila Yellin General Manager & COO: Greg DeClemente Annual Volume of Business: $25 million Number of Agents: 10 in-house agents and 30 independent contractors Business Mix: 60 percent corporate/40 percent luxury leisure Affiliations: Tzell Travel/ Signature Travel N etwork Website: www.courtyardtvl.com want them all to call or write. Or, they can just send them something funny just to keep us in mind.” Yellin also makes use of Signature Travel’s quarterly publication, which is printed with the Courtyard Travel name for the purpose of distributing it to its customers. Besides giving them to her agents to send to their clients, she drops them in a bank in the building that has given her permission to do so. Ever the entrepreneur, she also leaves them in the building’s ladies’ room. Along those same lines, Yellin is insistent that the postcards she is currently sending to clients, inviting them to take part in a Canyon Ranch program, be handwritten. “I just want people to feel that it’s more personal,” she tells Luxury Travel Advisor. “They get so many e-mails and so much printed material. So my receptionist is sitting and writing them,” she says. While the Canyon Ranch program that is promoted includes the Tucson property for those clients who want a warm-weather experience, the main focus is on the Berkshires, a market that is easily accessible to Courtyard Travel’s Gold Coast clientele. Yellin and DeClemente feel that selling nearby resorts to the drive market may be the route to take in the current economic climate. For Courtyard Travel, business has been flat, yet optimism reigns that things will improve in 2009. “The idea with the Canyon Ranch www.luxuryta.com December 2008 | LUXURY TRAVEL ADVISOR 41 http://www.courtyardtvl.com http://www.luxuryta.com
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