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7 November, 2018

“We’re a leader in social responsibility”: Collette CEO Dan Sullivan

By laurencroft

In South Africa, Collette supports schools and has built a bakery and a water wheel for the community. In Alice Springs, they help abused young girls find a voice for themselves.

Unsurprisingly, their customer numbers are growing more and more – no easy feat for a hundred-year-old company.

To find out just how they’re doing it, we caught up with Collette CEO Dan Sullivan to chat about all things group touring, sustainability and growth.

And this is only part one of the interview! Keep your eyes peeled next week for part two, where we take a deeper look at Collette’s Exploration Tours offering, and the relaunch of them this year.

“The reason that we’ve been around a hundred years is we have to keep evolving,” Sullivan explained.

“There are a lot of people that are gone – they didn’t evolve. Companies have to evolve and change to meet the market expectations and the consumer wants, the consumer today wants something very different to 1990. And every year that changes.”

Throughout recent years, however, and looking forward, consumers are demanding sustainable and responsible travel from touring operators.

And that’s something Collette is doing extremely well. In fact, they have projects all over the world via the Collette Foundation, which gives back to children in communities around the world.

“I think we’re a leader in social responsibility,” Sullivan said.

“There’s a number of companies around the world that do a good job in it, but it is something that we have to all be focused on – we have to do a lot more because these issues still exist.”

Collette has continued to experience double-digit growth, with their customer numbers getting even higher in Australia. In fact, Sullivan said while the company nabs new companies every year from all countries, Aussie customers make up the highest percentage of new growth.

“We’ve had great growth in Australia, but as a company we’ve had great growth because we try to do the right thing, we create the right products,” he said.

Sullivan added that the key to the company’s continued growth – not just in Australia but all over the world – is their philosophy; unchanged since 1918. Plus, their five-star product.

“We have the same philosophy of exploration and innovation and immersion that I think is what’s kept us around for 100 years.

“We’re in a niche where we’re affordable, that five-star customer wants that immersion, our experiences are five-star and our hotels are four-star-plus. So the three-star client can trade up, and still afford the price, and the five-star client can come down for the more reasonable price. But it really is a five-star product.”

And although Collette only launched down under a few years ago, the tour operator is finding that their customer growth has a lot to do with their responsible tourism initiatives, particularly in third-world countries like Peru or South Africa – both of which are becoming extremely popular for visitors.

“Many customers want to go with someone who has a social responsibility in the community that they travel to so if we’re going to South Africa or Peru, all the travellers are more fortunate than the people there. Yet we’re taking people there and we make money off that, so I think it’s a responsibility for the travelling community and travelling companies to make that community a better place to live.

“In a perfect world, all those people have a good life and they’re happy and fed nutritionally and they have water and are educated, so they have the same opportunities that we have. And that’s kind of how we look at it,” Sullivan said.

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Collette Collette explorations Responsible Travel sustainable travel The Collette Foundation