Global Travel Collection to sunset legacy brands

Global Travel Collection—the luxury advisor services division of Internova Travel Group and “the world’s largest collection of international luxury travel agencies”—is planning to bring its agency brands under a single alignment by spring 2026.

Speaking with LATTE, Angie Licea, president of Global Travel Collection (GTC), said that nearly all of the collection’s existing brands—including Protravel International, Tzell Travel Group and All Star Travel Group—will become one under a new, rebranded GTC. (Altour Corporate will remain a brand, but GTC independent contractors will stop using the brand. In addition, In the Know Experiences, a boutique agency within Global Travel Collection, will also continue operating under its existing brand.)

A Unified Approach

In preparation, Global Travel Collection has already reorganized its ARC and IATA numbers. This consolidation, Licea said, “really positions GTC to plan for the future—being recognized as a singular company. As you can imagine, when we operate under different brands and identities, what is truly a $2.3 billion company looks fragmented—$500 million here, $800 million there—making it difficult to fully leverage GTC’s scale. We’ve already been very successful in consolidating the ARCs, and now we’re taking the important next step of consolidating the brand.”

The GTC president also joked that the single brand will “certainly make it easier on folks like yourself” (referring to LATTE) since we—and other publications—will no longer need to use an entire paragraph to explain the relationship between all of the brands.

By March 2026, only “Global Travel Collection” will remain. We can’t wait.

Several other things are top of mind to Licea; among them: the company’s inaugural ARRIVE conference, which took place in May; expanding its educational trips for advisors; and continued integration of artificial intelligence in the form of Atlas AI, built in partnership with Microsoft.

Events and Education

The first ARRIVE conference was held earlier this year at the Arizona Biltmore, LXR Hotels & Resorts. About 600 luxury travel advisors and suppliers convened for more than 15,000 one-on-one meetings across three days.

Just about half of the advisor attendees were from GTC’s “Circle”—the top 15% of the group’s advisors, each of whom generates at least $3 million in annual sales. The event, however, was open to all GTC advisors but Licea explained that her team selected certain advisors to ensure there was fair representation among the collection’s “top performers,” “rising stars” and beyond.

Next year, the event will take place in June at the Fairmont Austin.

Separately, at Virtuoso Travel Week this year, the network’s chairman and CEO Matthew Upchurch spoke about the need to reevaluate the independent contractors at its agencies to ensure they are held up to proper “Virtuoso advisor” standards. Licea brought up a similar concern.

She said, “We have to make a choice. Are we going to go the path of cutting back everything and just purely making this a volume play, or are we going to continue to fight to add value for our advisors?”

One way that GTC is focusing on professional growth is through its education trips. Last year, GTC offered 36 exclusive trips. Note that these are not “recognition trips,” but are FAM trips-turned-educational studies.

As an example, Global Travel Collection partnered with Micato Safaris to offer a sustainability-focused Educational trip. Six travel advisors took part in the trip through Kenya’s national parks. They experienced how sustainability and luxury can go hand in hand, through eco-conscious lodges, conservation programs and community empowerment initiatives.

We asked: Was this initiative due to more clients asking about sustainable travel experiences or was it to encourage advisors to that that onus off the client and drive eco-luxury travel as a top-down approach? Said Licea: “It’s a little bit of both … part of it is because there’s demand, the other part is it’s the right thing to do.”

Adaptation of Artificial Intelligence

Licea was also excited to talk about Atlas AI, a platform built for its advisors in partnership with Microsoft using Azure AI Foundry and Copilot Studio.

Atlas is an internal tool trained on over 400,000 data points that will allow advisors to ask it questions about, for instance, who a go-to contact is within GTC, who the general manager of a specific hotel might be, or for assistance with commission payments. Advisors can also ask it for hotel recommendations and other topics it’s currently not trained on but, due to Atlas’ connection to other sources, will still be able to assist with.