It follows Inside Travel’s "most successful year to date" with the trade in 2024, a trend that continued in the new year – the group’s 25th anniversary year – after recording a 44% year-on-year increase in trade business in January.
Besides the £25,000 cultural adventure incentive, which the winning agent will be able to share with family and/or friends, Agent Insiders will have opportunities to secure one of 10 places on InsideJapan small group tours, with each place worth anywhere from £2,250pp to £8,850pp.
“We’re prepared to put our money where our mouth is," said ITG head of trade sales, Gabo Quiros. "This is not another boring prize or fam trip place. This is something special, we want agents to experience what we do best."
The programme is designed to help agents sell cultural adventures and small group tours, and improve their ability to land high-value sales.
To qualify for the incentives, any interested agents must subscribe to ITG’s trade-focused emails, watch a training video and then complete and pass a quiz, and attend at least one webinar throughout the year.
Each booking agents make with the group’s InsideJapan and InsideAsia brands will count as an additional entry and improve their chances of winning one of the 10 small group tour places or the £25,000 cultural adventure. The initiative is being supported by a dedicated Agent Insider website.
"The trade is massively important to Inside Travel and essential to driving growth," said Quiros. "We want to offer something special – not just another boring prize.
"The Agent Insider programme not only allows agents to give their clients incredible holidays, but it helps the agent improve sales, with the support and insight of our specialists."
ITG co-founder Alastair Donnelly said the launch of Agent Insider was ideally timed to help agents capitalise on the growing popular of some of the group’s core destinations, such as Japan, South Korea and Vietnam.
"When we founded the company in 2000, it was all about introducing what makes our destination [Japan] so special and helping visitors ‘get beneath the surface’ and experiencing a richer cultural adventure," said Donnelly. "This is still very much what we do. The Year of the Snake is going to be big."
