Azamara Club Cruises, which created a new compensation model with Virtuoso last year by paying a higher commission for high-value sales, has signed a similar contract with Vacation.com.
The scale upends the traditional industry compensation model, which is based almost entirely on volume.
Larry Pimentel, president and CEO of Azamara, defended the new model in an interview in November, arguing that the volume-based compensation model is flawed because “volume in the absence of profit is meaningless.”
Under the Vacation.com contract with Azamara, effective now through the rest of the year, all Vacation.com members can participate in the High Value Guest Incentive Commission program.
Vacation.com agencies can earn as much as 5% more than their existing commission level, capped at 21%, for suite bookings, reservations made a year or more in advance or back-to-back bookings.
Vacation.com will introduce the program to members with a webinar that will be available on its Agent Universe Web portal.
Vacation.com, which has 5,100 member agencies, is frequently seen as a mass-market consortium. But it is something of a stealth player in luxury, with a significant amount of high-end business.
The consortium has 1.6 million luxury consumers in its database, according to Vacation.com President John Lovell. He defines luxury consumers as those who have exhibited a propensity to buy more upscale products such as suites and first-class air.
Lovell said that Vacation.com has had 100 new agencies sign on with the consortium this year, each of which sells Vacation.com’s preferred suppliers and upscale travel.
Vacation.com did not say if these new members had previously belonged to carriage-trade consortia such as Virtuoso or Signature Travel Group; a spokeswoman said the consortium did not release that kind of information about new members.
However, Lovell said that Vacation.com operates in a very competitive marketplace and has a unique value proposition that differentiates it.
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Follow Kate Rice on Twitter @krtravelweekly.