Announcement
It began with a few conversations at a trade show. It became a professional network of independent luxury travel agencies, founded in 2020 by Andrea Oschetti and twelve founding houses.
Most of the founders of The Alliance first met the way people in this trade usually do: once or twice a year, across a table at a trade show. They were owners of independent luxury travel agencies in different countries, who knew one another's names, respected one another's work, and rarely had time for more than a handshake.
It was at one of those shows in 2019 that Andrea Oschetti from Blueflower started asking a different set of questions. For top executives, learning from best practice and using it as a benchmark is vital, but in a highly fragmented travel industry dominated by small businesses, high-level strategic insight is both hard to access and expensive to acquire. Most agencies excel in certain areas while struggling in others — boasting deep product knowledge, for instance, but falling short on technology or HR systems. The solution lay in genuine peer collaboration. By creating a trusted community where agencies share what they do best, members can pool their knowledge and experience, using collective insight to make every house stronger.
Then the pandemic arrived. Almost overnight, travel stopped, and every agency faced the same crisis at the same time: frozen payments, deposits held by suppliers, anxious clients, cancellations by the hundred. The conversations that had begun as an exchange of ideas became a lifeline. The founders helped one another resolve problems with payments and suppliers, compared how they handled clients, and opened their personal networks to one another freely.
Out of that year came a decision. In 2020, Andrea Oschetti and twelve founding houses established The Alliance: Blueflower, Elefant Travel, DayOne, Hurlingham, Il Viaggio, Far'n Away, KFT, Whywander, Celestielle, Regency, 80Days and Viajan. It was to be a fellowship of like-minded, independent luxury travel agencies around the world. From the start, the founders were clear that it would not be just a social club. They drafted bylaws and regulations and built the foundations of a professional organization, one meant to last beyond the crisis that brought it together.
Two principles have held ever since. The Alliance operates as a true siblinghood built on absolute peer equality, where every member agency maintains its full independence while committing to shared growth. Membership is defined by four core values: generous contribution, continuous innovation, total confidentiality, and active commitment. Rather than operating as a transactional network where members merely seek benefits, houses actively pool their distinct strengths, respect total privacy, and leverage their collective voice to inspire rather than impose across the luxury travel community.
Today, The Alliance brings together 31 luxury travel agencies across 30 countries. It runs shared projects within its community, produces market studies and strategic intelligence for its members, and holds regular meetings among them. Through its 31 member houses, it also connects 625 travel designers, forming what may be the largest collective knowledge hub in ultra-luxury travel.
It began as a few conversations at a trade show. Today, The Alliance is a professional voice for independent luxury travel, and this website opens those conversations to the wider trade.
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