Management Realigns as Consumer Activity Jumps on Websites and Social Channels
Beaverton, OR (June 1, 2021) – Passport Online Inc., the industry’s leader in travel agency digital technology, reports increased activity on consumer facing travel agency websites and social channels. With increased demand on agencies and need for expanded digital presence, Passport Online has restructured its management team along with considerable focused investments in advisor and supplier resources and tools.
Long time Passport Online executive Jeanne Colombo has been named President of the company. Colombo was most recently Vice President of Strategic Partnerships and brings more than 3 decades of travel industry experience and nine years with Passport Online to the role. “I am both privileged and excited to lead our team out of the pandemic and into a time of resurgence for travel agencies. We have refocused our engineering, sales and support teams to put Passport in the best strategic position to support our clients and customers as travel rebounds.”
Passport Online Co-Founder and board member Randy Goodrich is returning to the company as Senior Vice President. Goodrich will spearhead new destination and supplier programs to help deliver content directly through travel advisors to the traveling public. Goodrich will also lead an expansion of Host Agency programs for the organization.
Andrew Borst has been promoted to Vice President of Technology and Christina Lynch has been promoted to Senior Manager, Business Development. Borst is charged with bringing new tech innovations to the advisor community to support their increased customer needs. Lynch will manage all travel advisor programs including NexCite, VacationPort and ESP sales and service. Lynch is assuming some of the roles previously held by 20-year Passport Online team member Cynthia Juhnke who is retiring this month.
Consumer search activity on Passport Online powered travel agency websites jumped significantly in April. Detailed offer views, which represent a customer clicking through to a specific supplier offer on a website, were up 53% over March searches. Cruise made a strong comeback in search activity as well. In April, Cruise represented 53 percent of all searches. Tours represented 26 percent and packaged travel 20 percent.
U.S. travel topped the destination searches, with Las Vegas in the lead. Traditionally Alaska would top the searches this time of year. Additional search leaders including Europe and Mexico. Consumers viewed nearly 300,000 destination pages on travel agency websites in April.
“Our focus for the last 25 years has been aggregating and displaying leisure travel content so our travel advisors can feature supplier products on their websites, within emails and on their social media pages. We have nearly 100 of the consortia and host agencies’ leading preferred suppliers in our system. We will now focus on adding rich media content from destinations and resorts with some very exciting display tools,” said Goodrich. “Since our founding, Passport Online has been able to access unique data because we are at the very front end of people’s shopping cycle. They have not necessarily booked yet, but they are on their travel agency’s websites and they are shopping. We will be using the data from the new travel paradigm, post-pandemic, to help our travel agency customers best serve their clients.”
Passport Online is in the unique position to monitor consumer interaction with their travel agency as the company helps more than 7,500 travel agencies create, expand and diversify their digital footprint through websites, social media and email marketing, powers the content for more than 1,600 travel advisor Facebook pages, and works with more than 30,000 agents in partnership with many of the industry consortia and host agencies as well as hundreds of independent advisors.
For more information on the website products, contact Jeanne Colombo at [email protected].
About Passport Online
Passport Online is the leisure travel industry leader in website, web content, email marketing, and social media solutions. Passport also offers state of the art cruise and tour booking engine solutions for b-to-b and b-to-c needs. A major distribution channel for leisure travel suppliers to connect with the leading consortia, retail agencies, professional home-based agent networks, and their clients, Passport Online enables millions of consumer shopping sessions on thousands of travel agency websites. For more information, visit www.passportonlineinc.com.