"The wind beneath our wings": ACV's Dream Makers stops in T.O.; Adam Stewart headlines

STORY BY MICHELE YEO

“ACV is the wind beneath our wings.” Quite an endorsement coming from Adam Stewart, executive chairman of Sandals Resorts International and the surprise guest at Air Canada Vacations’ Dream Makers in Toronto on Thursday night (Sept. 26).

"A hotel without a bunch of Canadians in it is no hotel at all," he told the packed crowd of local travel advisors.

Toronto marked the fifth and final stop for ACV Dream Makers’ cross-country roadshow, which kicked off in Vancouver on Sept. 4 and saw subsequent stops in Edmonton, Halifax and Montreal along the way.

“We will have seen over 3,000 travel consultants across the country,” said Nino Montagnese, vice-president of Air Canada Vacations, in an interview with PAX News. “And it was not just to promote our sun products, but to show our agents that we offer the world."

While ACV certainly offers sunny destinations like Bermuda, Cancun, Los Cabos, Tulum, Punta Cana, Saint Martin, Turks and Caicos, and Costa Rica, Montagnese hopes travel advisors across Canada came away from the various Dream Makers events armed with enough knowledge to recommend a wide array of destinations to their clients.

"If you're going to do a bucket list vacation, come to me, I'm going to put you on Air Canada Vacations, which is a trusted brand," is what he hopes advisors will communicate to their clients.

“Sun is still one of our key product lines, but we’ve launched Dubai tours, we've launched India tours, we've launched Asia tours, we’ve launched more Europe tours, we just launched Colombia tours,” Montagnese said. “One of our pillars is broadening our horizons, and broadening our horizons means we need to look outside of our normal product, and that's what we've started to do. They have all sorts of customers and we have all sorts of product.”

But when it does come to choosing a sunny destination, Stewart, of course, hopes Canadian travel advisors will recommend one of his destinations to their clients.

“There’s a lot of love between our countries,” he told PAX News in an interview. “Any excuse to come up here and get the opportunity to just express my extreme appreciation to the advisor community, to drive more Canadians to our part of the world, it's a great honour and a privilege.”

Stewart told PAX he grew up watching his father, Sandals founder Gordon “Butch” Stewart, forming and flourishing relationships with travel advisors, and it’s something he wanted to continue and expand once he took over the business.

“I wanted to double down on the travel advisor distribution channel and we have grown it exponentially, not only in Canada but across our entire organization,” he told PAX. “You can almost call me kind of old school in that regard — having a human being be able to talk to a human being, to be able to say ‘I know the product, I've been there’... we believe is directly related to the success we're having.”

When it comes to the upcoming winter travel season, Stewart is extremely optimistic. "I think 2025 is going to be the first real year since Covid where everything is back to normal and operations are flying, guest services are flying.”

Stewart cites Sandals Dunn River and Sandals Curaçao, as well as Royal Caribbean and Sandals South Coast as hot properties he’d like to see advisors recommend to clients.

“We’re in what we call Sandals 2.0. We've reinvented the company and are continuing to,” he said, crediting ACV with having a hand in Sandals’ success. "Air Canada is on fire with our company right now like we've never seen before and we think the moves we've made together are the right moves. And we owe Nino and Air Canada Vacations a great debt of gratitude.”

When it comes to sailing the high seas, ACV announced a new product is a new cruise partnership with Virgin Voyages, but Montagnese said this year has really been all about technology, like the previously announced ACV’s Insta Quote for groups, as well as Trip Book and modifications to Manage My Bookings on ACV’s website.

“Since last year we really have been able to deploy a lot more technology for our partners,” he said. “We're trying to make it easy for them to deal with us.”

Montagnese said ACV has spent the last year listening to travel advisors, taking their feedback into consideration and putting much of it into practice. In fact, ACV used the Toronto Dream Makers event to announce it has formed an 11-person advisory panel made up of travel professionals from across the country.

ACV put out the call for applicants in their sales team “Inner Circle” Facebook page, which boasts 10,000 members. Montagnese says the chosen members are a mix of “all levels” of travel advisors: “Could be a manager, an agency owner, a consultant.”

While ACV Dream Makers Toronto 2024 was a rousing event, Montagnese promises 2025 will be bigger, even golden, if you will.

"I don't know how we're going to top this, but next year is going to be much grander so that we can celebrate our 50^th anniversary,” he told PAX. "We've got 50 years of building vacations for clients. I don't think many tour operators are as old as we are. Next year is going to be a party.”

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