Taking travel to the streets: Agency finds opportunity at Taste of the Danforth

For travel agencies, building a business has traditionally meant cultivating relationships with clients and suppliers.

But for Toronto-based Travel Design By Leila Lavaee, stepping outside the office and into one of the city’s biggest street festivals showed the value of building another kind of connection: one with the community.

The luxury bespoke travel and adventure expedition agency recently teamed up with Canadian tour operator G Adventures at Taste of the Danforth, a long-standing festival celebrating Greek heritage, food and multiculturalism, which ran Aug. 7-9.

It marked the agency’s first activation of its kind and scale, putting its travel designers face-to-face with festivalgoers while giving the business widespread exposure along one of Toronto’s busiest streets.

The opportunity arose as Taste of the Danforth prepared to return after a two-year absence and organizers revealed that the festival did not have a travel sponsor.

“We took it as a challenge,” Leila Lavaee, chief travel designer of Travel Design By Leila Lavaee, told PAX. “A boutique agency doesn't sponsor a festival of that size on its own, so the real question was who we could bring to the table with us.”

The agency approached three potential supplier partners, all of which saw value in the opportunity.

But with the festival itself coming together in roughly 90 days, the biggest obstacle was time.

“Every one of them told us it was a thoughtful, well-matched opportunity, right audience, right fit for their business. But they also all said the same thing: it was very last minute,” Lavaee said. “Budgets needed approval, marketing teams needed to weigh in, and the clock had essentially run out.”

G Adventures, however, was able to move quickly.

A travel agency on the street

Travel Design By Leila Lavaee and G Adventures established a tent on the Danforth, staffed throughout the weekend by the agency’s travel designers and associates.

For Lavaee, having the people who actually plan vacations on site was important.

“I didn't want a table with brochures on it and nobody behind it. I wanted the people who actually design our clients' trips standing there, talking to whoever walked up,” she said.

The activation extended far beyond the tent. A giveaway was promoted on festival screens, banners and signage, while QR codes circulated throughout the site.

The prize? A trip for two to Greece on a G Adventures tour.

Scanning the QR code directed festivalgoers to a feedback survey, with completion automatically entering participants into the draw.

The approach generated useful feedback for organizers while giving the agency and G Adventures a way to connect with potential travellers.

Travel Design By Leila Lavaee also secured an exclusive offer of 15 per cent off a G Adventures booking for people who visited the tent, with some exclusions applying.

The winner of the Greece trip is expected to be announced by the end of August.

Relationships make things happen

For Lavaee, the partnership with G Adventures also demonstrated why relationships between travel agencies and suppliers matter – especially when opportunities emerge unexpectedly.

She approached David Green, managing director, Canada and VP customer and sales operations at G Adventures, and worked closely with Marketing Manager Sara Murphy and the company’s marketing team to get the activation off the ground.

“Three good companies liked the idea. The one that said yes was the one where we had a real relationship, someone senior enough to decide quickly, and a team willing to meet us halfway when neither side had much to spare,” Lavaee said.

“That's not luck. That's years of relationship-building doing its job on a short deadline.”

There was also a natural connection between G and the festival.

The tour operator was founded in Toronto in 1990, while its community tourism philosophy aligned with an event centred on supporting neighbourhood businesses.

“Their community tourism model lined up with the event, too,” Lavaee said. “The idea that a trip should leave money and benefit in the place it visits is exactly what Taste of the Danforth does at neighbourhood scale, with 127 mostly family-run restaurants having their best weekend of the year.”

“A company that offers a Greece itinerary for a taste of Danforth was relevant too.”

G Adventures' wide range of tours also gave the agency flexibility when speaking with the festival’s diverse audience.

“We could talk to a twenty-five-year-old backpacker and a couple planning their first big trip in years, and have something real for both,” Lavaee said.

More than 2,000 entries

The activation ultimately generated more than 2,000 contest entries, but Lavaee said the conversations that unfolded at the tent demonstrated why community events can offer agencies something that conventional advertising cannot.

Some visitors already knew G Adventures and had travelled with the company. Others had never heard of small-group touring, giving the travel designers an opportunity to explain the concept.

Then there were experienced travellers whose needs had evolved beyond group touring.

“Those conversations went somewhere entirely different: bespoke trips designed around one couple or one family, expedition cruising, river cruising, whatever the next thing was for them,” Lavaee said. “It was a useful reminder that a prize draw gets someone to your table, but what keeps them there is being able to answer whatever they actually need.”

Existing clients also stopped by, creating a different kind of interaction for the agency.

“There's something different about seeing the people you've sent around the world standing in front of you on a Toronto sidewalk,” Lavaee said. “Those three days weren't just entries in a draw. They were a couple of thousand people on the Danforth who now understand what small-group travel is, and what we do.”

Showing people what travel advisors do

That ability to explain the value of a travel advisor was among the biggest business benefits of participating in the festival, Lavaee said.

Despite the growth of professional trip planning and highly specialized agencies, she said misconceptions about the role remain.

“Most people still don't know what we actually do. They think a travel agent books a flight,” she said. “When you're standing across from someone on a sidewalk, you can explain in thirty seconds that we design the whole trip and hand it over finished, and you can watch it land. That doesn't happen in an ad.”

For an agency specializing in bespoke travel, those conversations can also reveal what potential clients are actually looking for before a product is put in front of them.

“A booth on a street is one of the few places you can find out what someone actually wants before deciding what to offer them,” Lavaee said.

There were benefits on the supplier side, too. Lavaee said bringing G Adventures into the activation positioned her agency as more than a distribution channel, strengthening a partnership that ultimately benefits clients.

But beneath the leads, exposure and business development was a simpler motivation: being present in the city where the agency operates.

“We're a Toronto agency, and this was a Toronto festival trying to come back after two years away. We wanted to be part of that, and to help it succeed,” Lavaee said. “It matters to us to show that a community can pull together and make something happen, even on a short timeline with not enough hands. That was the real reason we said yes.”

For travel agencies looking for ways to stand out, the experience suggests community involvement can do several jobs at once – generating visibility, strengthening supplier relationships, educating consumers about the value of professional travel planning and putting advisors directly in front of prospective clients.

It can also push an agency beyond its usual comfort zone.

“We don't operate at mass scale. Standing in front of a moving crowd for three days and talking to hundreds of people is a completely different muscle, and it was a good challenge to prove we could do it well,” Lavaee said.

“It also gave the whole team a chance to talk about the thing we actually care about, which is travelling the world, with people who were genuinely excited to hear it.”

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