Ah, it’s mid-August! How did that happen? It’s still beautiful summer holiday time, but it’s slipping away by the moment, and attention is turning toward the fall season. That’s typically when the students go back to school and the adults get down to business, nicely refreshed from at least some easing up in summer, if not an actual vacation.
It’s time to bear down on all the things that have to get done in the fall. In earlier times for most people, fall was the time of harvest—time to put up stores for the winter. For people in the travel industry, it’s conference season. And for some, a number in which I include myself, the highlight and the grand finale of the fall conference season is the USTOA Annual Conference and Marketplace, held around the end of November and the beginning of December. This year will be the association’s 50th anniversary, a huge milestone by any measure.
This is a primo conference. It is held by the US Tour Operators Association, but it’s not only about tour operators. It is a gathering locus for a variety of suppliers from all segments of the industry who converge there in order to make contact with the top tour operators of the industry.
It is an elite group, but in the best possible way. The USTOA was formed in 1972 in California by a handful of tour operators seeking to create a way for travelers and travel advisors to identify tour operators that were trustworthy. There had been a number of bankruptcies, failures and outright swindles in the news from companies identified as tour operators, and some reputable companies didn’t want the bad publicity to bleed over into their profession.
They created a way to certify their members, to make sure that only companies that were solid and trustworthy could carry the seal of the organization. They called it a Good Housekeeping Seal, but the significance of that is probably forgotten by now. It was a way to certify tour operators you could trust.
The means by which the organization qualified tour operators for membership evolved over the years, but early on it settled into a policy under which any tour operator that wants to be a USTOA member has to post a million dollar bond to get over the threshold. It was a proof of solvency, financial wherewithal.
The $1 million dollar bond was a real assurance that the association represents a selection of tour operators who have integrity and can be trusted. That was where USTOA started and it has built on that foundation, to the point where now it is a multi-faceted operation that provides a variety of means to help build and improve travel businesses of all kinds. Besides its core membership of tour operators, it also has a tier of associate members, suppliers from all parts of the industry, from destinations to insurance companies.
The USTOA tour operator members are known as “the cream” of the tour operator segment. They have earned that distinction. They are the tour operators that the destination marketing organizations, and the various other suppliers, want fervently to get some facetime with. Tour operators are the center of the industry, connecting all the other parts: the hotels, the airlines, the ground operators, and the travel advisors. For many destinations, USTOA is the key to penetrating the coveted American market.
That combination of market segments creates a sparkling, electric conference. It’s a select group, gathering a short time for the primary purpose of networking and doing business—while having a whole lot of fun doing it. Business meetings are arranged in a systematic way, so that tour operator representatives sit at tables and take appointments one after another during a couple of concentrated meeting sessions structured into the calendar of the conference.
One special advantage is that the USTOA conference has a reputation for being one of a select few conferences to which the companies send their top people. If you want to talk to the actual heads and decision makers of the tour operator companies, you have a good chance to do it at the USTOA conference.
Outside of the business meeting sessions, there are many other events that serve as further opportunities for networking. That includes a variety of activities and presentations that are both educational and entertaining.
This year will be a special USTOA conference in more ways than one. There is, of course, the 50th anniversary. But also making this year special is the fact that it’s taking place at the time when the country and the travel industry are finally emerging from the long-haul bummer of the COVID disaster. That will give the conference an extra kick of energy and excitement. No matter how you look at it, 2022 is a unique and remarkable year, presenting its own kinds of opportunities and issues. It’s a time of rapid and radical change, a good time to gather with peer professionals and exchange ideas, observations, and experiences to prepare for the challenges to come in 2023.
In 2020 USTOA had to cancel the in-person event. In the absence of the conference, it did a virtual version. Being a top-notch professional organization, USTOA did the virtual conference with class and imagination, as would be expected. But, no one ever pretended that a virtual conference can take the place of the real, in-person thing.
After one year of a virtual conference, USTOA went back to the real thing again in late 2021. In December 2021, the world had emerged to a great degree from COVID, but there were still many aftershocks to come… shocks that would have the effect of hobbling the industry in various ways. This year feels more like the real, full-fledged coming-out from the long COVID nightmare.
People have been cooped up and travel has been handicapped for so long that people are dying to get out again, to meet each other in person again. And when they do get out and travel again, and attend in-person conferences, it’s such a great euphoria, a remembering of long-lost joys. I speak of this from first-hand experience. This kind of joy of re-uniting is what I anticipate at this year’s USTOA Annual Conference and Marketplace.
The USTOA conference of 2021 was the first one I have missed since I first attended in—are you ready for this? 1996. Let me spell it out. Nineteen-Ninety-Six. Yes, children, there was a world in 1996. And there was a USTOA conference that year. At that time, the association was at its 24-year anniversary, closing in on a quarter century. It sounded pretty old to me at the time. Now the association is at its 50th anniversary, and I have been attending its conference for half its life. Let me pick myself up off the floor. Just a second.
When I attended the conference in 1996, I had been reporting on the tour operator segment for Travel Agent magazine since the beginning of the year. When I got to the conference, I got to meet many of the people I had been reporting on and following for the previous year. They were like celebrities to me: Arthur Tauck, Sven Lindblad, the heads of all the biggest name tour operators, there, in the flesh. For me it was something like going to the Oscars.
This year the conference will be held Nov. 28 to Dec. 2 at the JW Marriott Austin in Austin, Texas. I, for one, am going to be there.
David Cogswell is a freelance writer working remotely, from wherever he is at the moment. Born at the dead center of the United States during the last century, he has been incessantly moving and exploring for decades. His articles have appeared in the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, Fortune, Fox News, Luxury Travel magazine, Travel Weekly, Travel Market Report, Travel Agent Magazine, TravelPulse.com, Quirkycruise.com, and other publications. He is the author of four books and a contributor to several others. He was last seen somewhere in the Northeast U.S.
