For years suppliers have invested heavily in marketing, photography, video, copy…you name it.
Entire brand ecosystems have been designed to inspire and intrigue, the goal of course to attract (more) guests. Producing these materials and making them available for travel advisors is certainly a costly lift, but then what? To do all that just to hope the imagery converts?
Historically, once those materials reach the agencies — whether by Dropbox, website, Google Drive, or umpteen other number of delivery systems — the burden then falls on advisors to repackage and distribute themselves. It’s a manual, inconsistent process that’s often done under pressure.
While the marketing might be strong, the execution has been fragmented the closer it gets to the sale.
Since February of 2023, Approach Guides has been positioning itself as the connective tissue between those two worlds, and, until now, that model has largely taken hold in cruise. But with almost every major luxury cruise line on board, now comes the pivot, as the company aims to provide the same service for hotels.
“Advisors are incredible at the human side of the sale,” said Jennifer Raezer, cofounder of Approach Guides. “But they were being asked to also become marketers for every partner they work with. That’s where the process starts to break down.”
For anyone unfamiliar, here’s how it works.
Instead of asking advisors to build campaigns from scratch, suppliers create what Approach Guides calls co-branded content inside the platform: polished and conversion-forward marketing experiences designed to be sent out as soon as an advisor has the perfect client in mind.
The content of the supplier website is activated and tastefully displayed in seconds, with the advisor’s own branding, their own voice, and crucially their own contact details embedded in the page.
On the surface it sounds like a workflow improvement, but what it’s really doing is optimizing an advisor’s agency in the sales process.
With a few clicks, an advisor can generate a fully white-labeled experience for their client. In some cases, that extends beyond static pages to a live version of the supplier’s own website, where the advisor’s details replace the supplier’s direct calls to action.
In other words, the client still sees the full product, but the relationship remains anchored to the advisor. The advisor gets credit and visibility in front of the brand, and any chance of disintermediation is eliminated.
The Raezers’ background is a blend between technology and finance, with Jennifer working at B2B technology companies in a variety of industries and David with a background in researching technology companies for institutional investors.
While the company started on the consumer side helping travel brands distribute content more effectively online, they soon realized how much of that same content never translated cleanly into the trade, despite advisors driving a significant share of sales.
What started as an idea to make supplier content more user-friendly for advisors evolved into a platform that is instead designed to strengthen the advisor’s role in sales rather than bolt it on.
The business model anchors the advisor-forward posture of the company. The platform is free for advisors, and suppliers fund the technology.
The logic is that if suppliers want their marketing to move more effectively through the trade, they should support the infrastructure that makes it not just usable, but convertible.
Advisors with top affiliations have not only started to take note, but partner up.
“This is exactly what we needed as a boutique agency. A true win, win, win,” said Jim Bendt, founder of Pique Travel Design. “Our advisors get an easy, scalable way to market the partners they believe in. Our suppliers see instant measurable results. And our clients get content worthy of the trips we’re designing. Technology should amplify relationships, not replace them, and that’s what Approach Guides does.”
Kristin Chambers, founder of Travellustre, points to consistency and ease of adoption.
“It is refreshing to have an efficient and uniform marketing strategy showcasing our preferred partners that our advisors can easily integrate into their day to day,” she said.
The timing is notable. Marketing, at both the host agency and individual advisor level, has become a recurring theme at industry gatherings. Agencies are investing more heavily to support marketing for individual advisor brands, but execution still varies widely.
Not every advisor has the time or resources to build campaigns from scratch, even when supplier content already exists. Approach Guides aims to bridge that gap by turning supplier resources into something advisors can immediately use without changing their workflow.
Cruise has been the natural proving ground. The category is heavily advisor-driven (by some estimates upwards of 70-85%), and leading brands have long invested in trade relationships.
Recent news underscores how quickly the platform is gaining momentum, as both Windstar Cruises and Azamara Cruises have gone live on Approach Guides within a week of each other in early May.
But hotels are a different test. They are far more decentralized, have a kaleidoscope of booking channels, and are far less standardized in how they support the trade.
Nevertheless, the Raezers remain confident, as early beta testing has yielded promising results.
Approach Guides has already begun working with early hospitality partners and representation groups, adapting its model to a sector where the advisor relationship is less structured, but no less important.
If it works, the implications are straightforward: Hotels would get a higher return from marketing they’ve already funded. On the flip side, advisors get tools that save time and elevate the experience for their client as well as their partners.
There might be a lot of hype around AI in travel, but tech in any industry arguably needs to fully understand the “why” before it begins to execute on the “how.”
For a platform that seeks to condense the historical disconnect between marketing and sales, perhaps that’s exactly the question that’s been long overdue.
Jacques Ledbetter is a Luxury Travel Advisor contributor and founder of The Luxe Ledger newsletter.
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