Ray Snisky Of Apple Leisure Group On The Future Of Travel In the Post Pandemic World

An Interview With Savio P. Clemente

We’re gonna continue to get up every day. There’s an old phrase that I love — “Whether you’re a lion or a gazelle, you have to get up every day and run through your life.” So we’re gonna continue to take our leadership position and continue to invest in being better. We’re going to listen to people’s feedback. Instead of us coming out with what’s new, we will decide based on what is curated from feedback from the end user of these products and services. I’m really excited about that part, and I think it’s going to continue to separate us from our competition.

As part of my series about “developments in the travel industry over the next five years”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Ray Snisky, Group President of Apple Leisure Group (ALG) at the 2021 Ascend Conference in Cancún, Mexico.

With over 30 years of experience in leisure tour operations and hotel management, Snisky leads the Apple Leisure Group (ALG) Vacations division and is a member of the Executive Committee. Snisky is responsible for all aspects of the ALG Vacations business.

Through the unparalleled distribution of Apple Vacations®, BeachBound® Travel Impressions®, CheapCaribbean.com®, Blue Sky Tours®, Southwest Vacations®, Funjet Vacations®, and United Vacations®, ALG Vacations serves more than 3.2 million guests annually — delivering more North American leisure travelers to Mexico and the Caribbean than any other hospitality company in the world, and positioning itself as the # 1 vertically integrated provider of charter flights.

As group president, how would you describe the perfect vacation getaway?

The perfect vacation getaway is the one that exceeds the customer’s expectations. There’s no one perfect. My perfect idea of vacation may not be yours. The most important thing is to have someone who understands what you’re looking for and has enough knowledge to guide you to a place they think would meet or exceed your expectations. It’s not a one size fits all and it doesn’t mean that the most expensive trip is the best trip. It’s really matching the right trip up to the customer’s expectations.

Which tips would you recommend to your colleagues in the travel industry to help them thrive and not burn out?

I’m a firm believer in clarity, in having a plan, knowing what your priority is, and how you’re going to resource that and how you are going to measure it. It’s been proven time and time again that if you can give someone clarity, it immediately starts to increase their energy level. They know how they can be measured. They know what their prioritization is. I think that’s vital. I think that when someone gets energy, they start to inspire action. They start to do more things, which ultimately creates momentum. This is especially true when you see the plan you’ve laid out come to fruition.

I feel like my unique ability is that I give confidence that we’re the company of choice whether you’re an employee or whether you’re a partner of ours. I found two new descriptions for confidence that I just absolutely loved and one is expected acceptance. Whatever you’re doing, whatever you bring to the table, you expect to be accepted because of your confidence or skill and the other one is undaunted and so to me, it’s not about being the biggest or the most successful.

You know, that last video that we just had was actually emotional for me. I know the journey that they’ve been on. I know how hard they’ve worked. I know the tears that have been shed throughout the year and just to see us at this position and getting all the right results and building our partnerships up and getting through all the bad periods where we weren’t servicing properly and so forth — it’s just been one of the highlights of my career.

None of us achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you’re grateful for, who helped you to get you to get where you are today?

Thank you for asking. It’s not any one person. I grew up in the Bronx without two nickels to rub together. It was sports and coaches that helped me. It was family, it was friends, it was bosses, direct reports, peers. I think you have to have a mindset that you want to not only understand what kind of help you can get, but to be open minded to it. I’ve always been a sponge. Sometimes you learn what not to do by dealing with certain folks as well. I’ve had so much help along the way. “Oh, he’s self-made”, but none of us are self-made, we’ve all had some help along the way.

Earlier in my career I was driven by titles and money. I wanted to be the first person to answer a question or solve a problem. I wanted to be the smartest person in the room. All that has no real pull for me any longer. At this stage of my career, I’m just thrilled to give people support and help them be the best version of themselves, take all my learnings and apply them to others. If I can accelerate someone’s learnings by using my experience, that’s really the stuff that gets me excited and now I realize if I’m the smartest person in the room, I’m in the wrong damn room, so yeah, it’s a fun time. It really is. I see how many people I have helped during the pandemic externally and internally, to give them confidence and provide them with some solutions, and it’s been wonderful. It’s been really rewarding.

Can you share with our readers about the innovations you’re excited about in the travel industry, especially with Hyatt Hotels?

At this point I can’t speak to Hyat specifically, although we’re excited about all their talents and finding ways to leverage those things moving forward. We’ve been the biggest in our business for a long time and I think sometimes size and revenue can give you a false sense of security so one of the big revelations for me is that we really need to try transform the business and be much more efficient and find ways to use technology and improve business processes and so forth. So we’re really committed to transforming the business. We’re now using bots that are allowing us to enter net rates from the hotels into the system.

Or we have a bot we affectionately called Ziggy that’s in our contact center. As someone starts to put in key strokes of information they need, it automatically starts teeing up using artificial intelligence. We’ve done a bunch of things from a technology standpoint to improve our accounting process and refund process. Some things have gone from 30 to 60 days down to 48 hours and so really a lot of great progress and transformation. It isn’t a destination, it’s a journey. We’ll always be trying to find ways to make ourselves better and still leveraging our size and scale, but allowing ourselves to be much more focused and that’s allowed us to have margin expansion by the reduction of operating expenses.

So how do you envision this might disrupt the status quo?

We’re gonna continue to get up every day. There’s an old phrase that I love — “Whether you’re a lion or a gazelle, you have to get up every day and run through your life.” So we’re gonna continue to take our leadership position and continue to invest in being better. We’re going to listen to people’s feedback. Instead of us coming out with what’s new, we will decide based on what is curated from feedback from the end user of these products and services. I’m really excited about that part, and I think it’s going to continue to separate us from our competition.

As you know, COVID-19 changed the world as we know it. Can you share five examples about how travel and hospitality companies will be adjusting within the next five years?

I think it’s in the way we engage the customer, we’re in the confidence building business. We have to let people know that we’ve got really good content and give them detailed information to help them know about the ever changing protocols around the world. We have to continue to come up with solutions like we did with the testing and the complimentary rooms, if they were to become positive. We’re working on a customer data platform now where all of the customer’s interactions with us and what they do on the website will be captured, and we will have artificial intelligence where we might have two ads for a particular activity but based on their actions, one might have a 70 year old person in the advertisement, and the other a 25 year old. We all have to be able to provide relevant content to the customer. That means lots of data driven decisions, lots of sourcing inventory. In the old days we would throw out a good special knowing that there were thousands of people out there that would want it and, and we can’t be that lazy moving forward. You know, we have to be able to put out offers to an audience that’s looking for those kinds of offers. So I see us refining our business and continuing to do things differently and that part’s really exciting. We’re all looking for things to be passionate about and sometimes it’s just seeing the opportunity for change and then having the resources to be able to make that happen.

Can you share with our readers, how have you used your success to bring goodness to the world?

Great question. In all of our incentive trips where we bring hundreds of agents to a destination, there’s always a give back program where we’ll go to an orphanage or a charity and we’ll do it all as a group and we’ll make some cash donations, but we’ll also have people coming down with suitcases filled with sneakers and clothes and toiletries, and we’ll have a little party for them where we deliver those types of things. I’m the executive sponsor for our race and ethnicity circle, we have not historically had a lot of engagement from people of color especially the African American community.

We can’t just sit back and wait for people to apply. We have to be leaders and be proactive and go and find people and engage them. Many people grow up not knowing their options for travel. We’re very excited about that. We also have a circle for folks with disabilities, for elevating women leaders. I’m proud to say that 71% of the managers and above in vacations are women and then we have one for the LGBTQ+, you know, so we’ve got four great circles that we’re thrilled about and I think that’s going to be something where we can give back as well.

Thank you so much. I really appreciate your time.