IBMT Tours shifts focus to travel agents

After marketing directly to consumers for several years, Holy Land tour specialist IBMT Tours is focusing on the travel agent community as well as expanding its destination offerings for 2016.

The tour operator, with offices in Toronto and Miami, has offered bar/bat mitzvah tours to Israel for several years by going directly to travellers. According to Ornan Sharaby, president & CEO of IBMT Tours, the change in strategy was the result of travel agents approaching the company to sell the product, adding that the product will be marketed to agents in Canada first before trying the approach south of the border.

“Until recently, we only offered product to public,” Sharaby told PAX. “If a travel agent called, we would help them. But now we’re getting agents calling us and asking if they can sell our tours and get a commission and the answer is yes they can. We’re promoting it now in Canada first; we have a U.S. office in Miami where we work with the public but here is really the first time that we work with travel agents in promoting that in Canada.”

In marketing to agents, Sharaby said that the company has also developed an agency registration option into its booking engine (allowing agents to login and book packages and instantly check commissions), which will be coming online soon.

While the company’s core product will remain religious tours of Israel (IBMT first stood for Israel Bar Mitzvah Tours and then Israel Biblical Mission Tours, Sharaby explained), new packages to Europe – including tours in Italy and Eastern Europe – as well as South America will be a focus for 2016, Sharaby said; the company also offers AMAWaterways product (the companies had previously worked together on a Jewish heritage cruise) at an 18 per cent commission to agents, as well as packages to Africa and Asia. Sharaby, a 30-year veteran of the travel industry, explained that while the company offers a wide variety of product, the focus is on quality, not quantity.

“We don’t want to be a supermarket,” he said. “Service is number one. We don’t want to be a tour operator that sells anything that makes money – we’re not here for that. We’re here for people who will come back and tell their friends that if they want a good tour, they go with IBMT.”

“This year, we are starting to offer tours to Europe as well,” he continued. “We’re doing Italy, Eastern Europe, we’re going to have three or four of our own tours, one of which will be a culinary tour, the other three are more general, high-end tours.”

Tours are operated on a weekly basis and are guaranteed – “they always go out whether its five, 15 or 25 people,” Sharaby said – with a choice of 3-, 4-, 4.5- and 5-star hotels and include breakfast, dinners, hotels, transfers, entrance fees from $1,236 per person, he explained.

Visit www.ibmttours.com for more information.