Published on : Friday, January 31, 2014
Cruise Lines International Association (CLIA) announced today the appointment of travel industry veteran Dwain Wall as Senior Vice President of Agency and Trade Relations. Effective immediately, Wall will begin leveraging his 30-plus years of experience in the travel industry and extensive relationships with the world’s leading travel organizations. This newly created position puts Wall at the helm of member and trade relations for the North American travel agencies that comprise CLIA, the largest travel agent association in the world.
“Dwain is one of the most respected and well-liked professionals in the travel industry,” said CLIA President & CEO Christine Duffy. “His track record of developing and implementing highly successful travel agent programs is a great fit for CLIA as we enhance our value to the agent community and grow our membership base. And, by creating a dedicated trade relations position, CLIA is once again reinforcing its total commitment to our travel agency members – a sustained partnership of almost 40 years.”
Most recently, Wall served as Senior Vice President and General Manager of World Travel Holdings’ home-based division, which is comprised of the CruiseOne and Cruises Inc. brands. Prior to joining World Travel Holdings, he co-founded the global luxury and adventure travel company Grand Expeditions and helped develop national affiliate programs for Hotels.com, now a major operating company of Expedia. Previously, Wall spent more than 10 years as a senior executive at Carlson Companies. He is a member of the International Franchise Association (IFA), the Board of Directors of the Professional Association of Travel Hosts (PATH) and the Editorial Advisory Board of Travel Market Report (TMR). He also has served on advisory boards for several cruise lines and tour companies, along with being an active member of CLIA’s Travel Agent Advisory Board.
“Travel agents count on CLIA to provide cutting-edge resources, including marketing, training and continuing education programs. For independent agents, this is critical as they may not have access to such programs and for agents who are affiliated with a host or franchise, CLIA is able to complement those organization’s offerings,” said Wall, who has himself been part of the travel agency channel since 1980. “In this new position, I look forward to creating a dialog across various segments of the industry about what our future looks like and helping develop innovative offerings to enhance CLIA’s value proposition. Ultimately, my goal is to help member agencies be more successful, profitable and dynamic while staying ahead of the game as the industry continues to evolve.”
Vicki Freed, Senior Vice President, Sales, Trade Support and Service, Royal Caribbean International, said, “I can’t think of a better person than Dwain for this position. He has a tremendous passion and enthusiasm for travel agents and knows what it takes to make them successful, whether they are part of a travel agent network, host agency or home-based. He is also very skilled at agent retention and recruitment and will lead efforts to keep the CLIA agent community engaged and growing.”
Commenting on Wall’s strength in travel agent development, Brad Tolkin, Co-Chairman/CEO of World Travel Holdings, added: “Dwain brings considerable bench strength to CLIA and its quest to build and support the largest and strongest possible agent organization. This is at the core of his expertise.”
As part of CLIA’s leadership team, Wall will work alongside Margaret Murphy, CLIA’s Senior Vice President of Strategic Marketing. Murphy will continue to have responsibility for CLIA’s travel agent education and certification programs, the North American Executive Partner program, and strategic marketing relationships and promotional activities for North America.
Source:- CLIA
Tags: Association News
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