How Little America Provides a Personal Approach to the Travel Experience

How to Deliver on Guest Desires with Branding Guru Samatha Hardcastle

By Nathan Gawlik

Nathan Gawlik's experience includes being a General Manager of a Hampton Inn and other front line roles such as a Banquet Captain, Front Desk Agent, Housekeeper, Catering Event Manager, and Director of Sales.

Since people who want to travel have needed a guide, travel brokers have existed. With international border restrictions, vaccine mandates, and quarantine requirements, there's never been a better time to hire a travel consultant to help you manage all of these concerns and plan a custom vacation.

I sat down with Robert Eelkman Rooda, Head of Product at the European-based company Little America, to see how its travel agents are providing personalized service to unique accommodations across the United States.

Tell me about Little America and how you provide value to properties and guests?

Our personal approach towards both our suppliers in North America and our guests in Europe is what makes Little America unique. We work directly with small-scale accommodation owners and together with them discuss ways to grow both our businesses.

Our sales staff go on "familiarization visits" to the United States and Canada on a regular basis to meet our hosts and experience our products first hand. When back in Europe they share their experiences in presentations for potential clients, and in their one on one meetings with clients. We do not sell anything online, as we visit our clients at their homes or in one of our 9 sales offices in the Netherlands, Germany and the UK, and sit down with them for several hours providing old fashioned travel advice. This approach of getting to know both our hosts and our clients face to face allows us to match the right type of clients to the right type of accommodations and experiences.

What is your relationship with Bed and Breakfast and small hotels here in the United States?

For our suppliers we have created a "Supplier Dashboard" where they can update their amenities and configurations, and manage their Little America bookings, update a calendar and inform us of their unavailable dates, they can manage their voucher information (images suppliers provide), download invoices for each booking with a date when we will pay them, and more. Our IT team is constantly improving our supplier platforms. For the clients, we are an old-fashioned travel company while in the background we are constantly developing our software and IT systems for both our suppliers and our clients.

We pay our suppliers in advance, 7-14 days before their guests arrive. We pay our suppliers the negotiated Net + Tax rates in their preferred local currencies (we use ACH payments for USD and EFT payments for CAD) so there is only one transaction per booking and no need to pay us commission after the guests have stayed. We send our suppliers a remittance advice informing them of the upcoming payment including their booking reference number, so they can easily match the received payment to the appropriate booking.

Sounds simple for properties. How do you simplify things for the guests traveling internationally?

We organize everything for our clients, we book their flights, rental cars, ferries, domestic flights, accommodations, tours, etcetera. We provide very nice looking vouchers with an overview of their travel route, descriptions and images of the regions they will visit, and of the individual accommodations and tours in their itinerary. We also provide all necessary practical information such as specific arrival information and contact details of their accommodations. We advise clients about the best routes and hidden gems away from the masses and advise them to travel slowly and in the quieter months. This all means that our clients arrive at our suppliers doorsteps very relaxed, well-prepared and they really are on a holiday.

"Business is Value Exchanged"

How long has Little America been in business? Can you tell me a little more about the origin of the company and why it started?

Little America's mother company TravelEssence was created in 2006 by Andrew Morten, who is from New Zealand and who moved to the Netherlands in 2000. He experienced that nobody in the Netherlands was offering travel to his home country New Zealand the way he thought you should travel, namely with a rental car instead of a camper, and staying with the locals at small-scale accommodations instead of staying at cheap motels. Thus he started TravelEssence and has made small-scale travel to New Zealand the new norm in the Netherlands. In the following years after 2006, Australia soon followed as a destination and Germany as a selling market.

In 2019, Little America was created under the umbrella of TravelEssence. In 2019, we had 8 sales offices in the Netherlands and Germany (we recently opened a 9th office in the UK), and 70+ staff, and were ready to add more destinations to our portfolio. We experienced a similar situation as described above for holidays to the US and Canada for European travelers, as most companies are focussed on selling campers or book packages with boring motels as accommodation, while the market/climate for small-scale accommodations and experience based tourism is huge and promising.

What are the most popular destinations or most popular packages?

We do not sell set packages to our clients as we do not sell anything online. Every trip that we create is unique and is a custom made day-to-day itinerary based on the interests of the clients, their budget, their preferred travel time, etcetera. Currently our most popular destinations are the Southwest, Mountain West, Northwest and Hawaii and Alaska in the USA, and in West Canada (BC & Alberta). We are currently developing new routes in the Deep South, East Coast, and New England in the USA, and in the Eastern provinces of Canada.

How long do your guests typically stay at a property?

We book a minimum of 2 nights and focus on booking 3-5 nights. On average we book 3.3 nights per destination.

Do the properties you work with see their room nights or revenue increase as a result of their partnership with Little America?

With our small-scale accommodations, the revenue/room nights we can send them depends foremost on the experience of our staff who visited them and the experience of our clients. It also depends on the type of property (single cabin, B&B, ranch, boutique hotel), and on the commercial agreements we have in place (good commission levels, and they can for example offer a shoulder season special rate, or a discounted rate for longer stays).

Generally speaking we book between 10-60K in net revenue with most of our accommodation suppliers. A quality B&B with 4-10 rooms in a good location with the right commercial agreement may expect ~150 room nights from us with the majority 3 or 4 night bookings, booked 4-12 months in advance.

Maybe the biggest argument to work with Little America compared to online booking platforms is the fact that we rarely cancel (<5%). We only start booking with our suppliers when our clients have signed a booking form, and after signing our clients cannot change individual components in their itineraries anymore. Also, being a preferred Little America supplier is not defined by flexible cancellation terms, but by the experience provided by the hosts of the accommodation or the guides providing an unforgettable experience to our clients.

It might also be interesting to have a look at this video where our TravelEssence partners in Australia share their experience about working with us: Happy Guests, Happy Suppliers.

Anything else you would like to share with our readers?

We motivate our clients to travel outside the peak seasons and in the shoulder seasons, and we advise them to book far in advance to secure their unique small-scale accommodations. Since we create packaged itineraries we rarely cancel our individual bookings. This means our suppliers know far in advance what to expect from us, and they have to deal less with last minute bookings and cancellations. In addition, our clients travel slowly and stay 2-5 nights in each location.

Conclusion

If you would like to find out more about Little America Travel, click here and fill out the form at the bottom of the page. Accommodation providers can also reach out to Robert at robert@littleamerica.nl

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