Turbulence Interview with Grégoire Elmassian of Les Maisons du Voyage

About Les Maisons du Voyage:

Founded in 1991, Les Maisons du Voyage (or “The Houses of Travel”) is a Parisian travel agency specialised in pre-packaged and customised trips to every corner of the globe catered towards the French market. Each Maison or ‘house’ represents its own country or geographic region, allowing those living and working inside it use deep expertise in building tours. In 2016 French media conglomerate Le Figaro acquired the group.

About Grégoire Elmassian:

First working for as a consultant for a “Big 4” and then as a financial controller in the luxury goods industry, he joined Les Maisons du Voyage in 2013 as their CFO. Looking for a challenge where he could make a real impact, he helped increase turnover from 35 million euros in 2012 to over 50 million in 2017. Now, as the group’s Managing Director, he runs the group’s finance department, back office, property management, boutique services and the Maison de Thé. He holds an MBA in Finance and Accounting from ESSEC Business School.

Turbulence: Les Maisons du Voyage takes a very compartmentalised approach to the business (i.e. each region is divided up into a “Maison”). What are the challenges and benefits of this type of operating model?

Gregoire Elmasian: We started off in 1991 as the “La Maison de la Chine,” specialising specifically in tours in a country that was still in the process of opening up. It was a success right from the start. So the idea was to replicate the idea in other countries, with Southeast Asia coming next and the Indian sub-continent afterwards (i.e. India, Sri Lanka, Nepal).

From a product and perspective, each house operates separately. They each have a dedicated team, individual website and cultural agenda. So, this gives the advantage of being extremely deep in our knowledge and understanding of each destination’s culture. This model has two benefits for us. First, we can build excellent relationships with our local suppliers. Second, our customers know that we have this expertise, and know that we can offer a very genuine cultural experience across the globe.

That said, there are also significant challenges with this approach. Each Maison is it’s own ‘company and brand’ making it sometimes difficult for our customers to understand that despite a different website and name, each house operates under one parent company.
Now, and with the support of our shareholders, we’re trying to make our audience aware that regardless of the “Maison,” they’ll get the same product and the same quality.

Additionally, we’re centralising our back-office to increase our efficiency and to reduce costs. Therefore, anything not related to the particular destination or client-experience is being consolidated. This task isn’t always easy because while there are similar processes across cultures, they aren’t always the same.

Today’s traveller is both increasingly independent and expecting personalised travel. For Les Maisons du Voyage, this represents a unique opportunity. How do you convince clients that using a travel agency is a better alternative than “going it alone?”

We aim to offer our customers an experience that they won’t find elsewhere and couple it with complete peace of mind. Some of our destinations are quite exotic, meaning that if something goes wrong, ‘going it alone’ can quickly become overwhelming.

Since we have such extensive expertise in each country, we can offer our clients an unrivalled experience. This background also lets us take care of any issues that might arise without negatively impacting the traveller’s experience.

Further, it’s extremely challenging to build a detailed, three-week-long trip on your own via the internet, especially when you want one without any surprises. So while it’s doable to go it alone, in the end, it will wind up being considerably more complicated, not to mention costly, and that’s one of the messages we convey with during the selling process.

Before becoming the group’s Managing Director, you were the CFO. How did the particularities of that role prepare you for your current one?

When you are the CFO of the company, if you try to explain the financial strategy to managers and other key people in the company, you make their job easier by finding answers and solutions to their problems. Through giving them financial context to their work, it helps them to understand why some things work and others don’t.

This knowledge empowers them to go out and do their jobs with more of a purpose, adding more value to their input and output. This strategy also benefits the CFO. First, you get outside of your traditional finance role by helping to become a leader in different functions of the company. Second, you learn about other parts of the business that you weren’t so familiar with previously.

Between building relationships and leadership with other departments and getting a broader education as a whole, I felt well-equipped with the inner-workings of the firm once I started in my current role.

How difficult is it to maintain quality control while providing high-quality packages in almost every corner of the globe?

This is a huge challenge and one that changes every day. First, we are extremely committed to our customers, and this commitment is felt everywhere in the company from the back-office to the front-office to the package producers, and beyond. We don’t have any ‘after sale’ or ‘after trip’ teams. Rather, our sales team is responsible for any negative feedback meaning that they are the ones who take ownership of any customer issues and directly finding a solution for them.

Therefore, the sales team strives to have the customer completely satisfied from the start. Even before they begin the trip, the sales and product team need to make sure that the client is happy with the itinerary.

Then, we maintain a long-term relationship with all of our suppliers. We challenge them every day to find the best and most-unique local products on offer that met our — and our customers’ — high expectations so that we can, in turn, put them in our packages. They know that we expect the highest quality from them and if they don’t meet our expectations — say we have a problem with local hotels or drivers — we try to find other solutions.

In a way, we have options, since travel is one of the most competitive industries in the world. However, making sure we find the right partners can be tricky as almost anyone can declare themselves a ‘travel agent’ or provider. That said, there are almost always quality alternatives out in the market.

In the end, the core challenge is to keep having everyone on board with our requirements; from our package builders to our suppliers. Only from there can we work knowing that our customers will be satisfied with our products. For us, it seems to be working. We have a 99% satisfaction rate. And while we know we’ll never get to a full 100%; we’re always looking for ways to address the remaining 1%.

You primarily cater to the French market. What particularities are there in working with French travellers? What are the do’s and don’ts when it comes to this demographic?

First, the French are quite price-sensitive clientele and do not typically like to pay for services without any justification. They need to understand the value that additional costs bring, meaning you have to both make that clear and keep them satisfied from the start. Therefore, you also have to be extremely competitive with your prices since anytime something goes wrong, they will question if they’re getting the correct return on their expenditures. As a result of this price sensitivity, margins for tour operators and travel agents in France are generally lower than in other markets.

Another thing is that French people are not very comfortable with foreign languages. While there are some who can speak English and other languages, by and large, most prefer to express themselves and travel in their language. So being able to communicate in French is a point that many tour operators and providers around the globe need to address to make travellers from France feel more comfortable during their holidays.

Of course, there are general security concerns. Terrorism and other security threats are quite prominent these days with France, unfortunately, being the target of recent attacks. This is particularly delicate for French travellers, and it’s of particular importance for them to feel safe when they’re travelling.

Additionally, French consumers are becoming increasingly more autonomous thanks to their smartphone. Many people here use their laptops, phones, and apps in their day-to-day lives. What we’ve seen though, and it makes sense, is that many of these apps don’t work abroad, or at least in the way they want them to when travelling. This is especially the case in undeveloped and developing countries. We’ve seen it as an issue on the ground, where we sometimes need to explain this to travellers during their trips.

These particularities make it somewhat difficult for foreign tour operators to break into the French market. Here in France, there are over 5,000 travel agencies who compete on already-thin margins and who also understand their client base. Therefore many firms coming from abroad have a hard time gaining market share without first understanding the local cultural intricacies.

In general (and this is a question we’re asking all of our interviewees), what do you see as the biggest challenge facing tourism and the travel industry today?

The massive transformation from technology that’s touching nearly every aspect of the industry. Companies like Airbnb are upending the hotel sector. For travel agents, de-intermediation — i.e. travellers going direct with suppliers — is very problematic, since the business is built around acting as an intermediary between tourists and providers.

In turn, this challenge forces us to look for increased efficiency across our business. For us, that means that our booking and operational processes along with our financial controls need to be as tight as possible. Additionally, in our field, FX management and managing the associated risks is of particular difficulty, considering that we’re working all across the globe. That said, technology helps a lot on that front. We’re able to automate many of these functions, helping us gain efficiency and lower our costs, letting us be more competitive in the process.

Originally published at www.kantox.com on September 28, 2017.