Flight Centre rebrands Liberty Travel as Envoyage to unify U.S. leisure operations
Flight Centre Travel Group is rebranding Liberty Travel as Envoyage, consolidating its U.S. leisure operations under a single global brand.
Liberty Travel will now be integrated into Envoyage, a brand that Flight Centre launched last year to unify roughly 1,400 independent contractors from Independent by Liberty Travel, Independent by Flight Centre, Travel Managers, Travel Associates at Home, Flight Centre Independent and Travel Partners.
According to Flight Centre, the Envoyage network has since grown to 2,500 members across the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. In the U.S., Envoyage said it has nearly doubled membership numbers and sales volume since its February 2024 debut.
At the time of the network's launch, Envoyage executive vice president and general manager Christina Pedroni said the Envoyage model is designed for experienced advisors selling more than $250,000 a year. Both its IC and agency tiers carry monthly fees, with commission splits ranging from 70% to 90% for ICs and accredited agencies receiving 100% commission.
"Through extensive market research conducted in the U.S. and across our global markets, the message from consumers and the industry alike is clear: Envoyage is a desirable, aspirational brand," said Danielle Galloway, global managing director of luxury and independent brands at Flight Centre Travel Group.
With the rebranding, Flight Centre said it plans to leverage Liberty Travel's extensive customer database and digital assets to extend Envoyage's reach beyond Liberty Travel's traditional Northeastern U.S. stronghold.
Flight Centre added that Envoyage advisors will benefit from an integrated consumer marketing campaign and lead-generation service.
Liberty Travel closed most of its storefronts during the pandemic. Today, most Liberty Travel advisors work remotely. According to Liberty's website, some advisors work in Flight Centre's U.S. corporate headquarters in Montvale, N.J.
The Liberty Travel rebranding comes amid Flight Centre's decision to ramp up its focus on luxury travel and independent contractors, which the company has identified as high-growth sectors.
Early last year, Flight Centre shuttered its Gogo Vacations wholesaler business, which it acquired alongside Liberty Travel in 2007. The closure came as Flight Centre said the wholesale model had been "struggling in recent years" with "high costs of maintaining this brand" becoming increasingly difficult to justify, said Charlene Leiss, Flight Centre president of the Americas.
The company has also expanded the U.S. leadership team for high-end tour operator Scott Dunn, which it acquired in 2023. Scott Dunn opened its first New York City office last year.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
CBS News
36 minutes ago
- CBS News
Minnesota Wild re-sign veteran Marcus Johansson to 1-year, $800,000 contract to avoid free agency
The Minnesota Wild re-signed right wing Marcus Johansson on Monday to a one-year, $800,000 contract that keeps the 15-year veteran from becoming a free agent. Johansson had 11 goals and 23 assists in 72 games for the Wild during the 2024-25 regular season, bouncing between the second and third lines. He was sixth on the team in points. The 34-year-old, who was acquired by the Wild from Washington a few days before the NHL trade deadline in 2023, played the 2024-25 season on a $2 million salary cap charge. Johansson had four goals and four assists in nine games for Sweden last month at the ice hockey world championships to help his native country's team win the bronze medal. He has 185 goals and 332 assists over 983 career regular-season games with seven teams in the NHL.
Gizmodo
an hour ago
- Gizmodo
8 Hours With Nintendo's Switch 2: It's the Sequel Handheld We Wanted
Nintendo's Switch 2 is a better handheld than the original Switch in both overt and subtle ways. The sticks aren't full-sized, but they tilt with just the right amount of force. The plastic has a subtle grainy texture that feels luxurious on my open palms. It's nearly as light and exactly as thin as the device from eight years ago, but it is much more powerful. Nintendo is desperate to prove its new design is worth the $450 asking price, but the real appeal for this console will lie beyond specs when it launches on June 5. You can't comprehend the appeal of the Switch 2 until you have it in hand. Gizmodo Senior Editor of Consumer Tech Raymond Wong and I spent close to eight hours with Nintendo's Switch 2, with the vast majority of that time spent playing Mario Kart World. We also tested out the system's new GameChat feature for online play, local co-op with camera functionality, and the new Welcome Tour 'game.' Both Gizmodo and io9 already shared their impressions of the Joy-Con 2 mouse controls along with several launch and soon-to-launch Switch 2 games. The mouse controls are still a highlight. They're very responsive, and the individual Joy-Con 2 feels comfortable enough in the hand. The optical mouse system works equally well on a flat counter or your pants' legs. See Nintendo Switch 2 at Walmart In my time playing around with the Switch 2, I started to feel like a beaver sliding comfortably into the same den I dug for the original Switch. You can take that statement two different ways. The Switch 2 isn't chock-full of original ideas save for a few select features—namely GameChat, mouse controls, and GameShare. Many of those new features simply enhance the best aspects of the original Switch. The Switch 2 is still the best console for having fun with friends. Nintendo has a problem communicating what's different with its hardware this time around. The Japanese console maker's devices aren't normally made for people who understand the distinction between 60Hz or 120Hz refresh rates or VRR, which is short for variable refresh rate. (If you're curious, refresh rates refer to how many times a screen displays a new image per second, and variable refresh rate is a feature that allows a screen to support a wider range of frame rates, which cuts down on flickering). That lack of specs clarity is why Nintendo made Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour. The game is an interactive instruction manual for the Switch 2 packed with minigames meant to showcase the hardware's improvements. Your tiny player character is plopped down on top of a literal Switch 2 handheld, like you're a tourist visiting a monument to Nintendo's grand vision. There are several islands sectioned off for the left and right Joy-Con 2, the main screen, and the dock, each containing their own minigames and quizzes. The maps include help guides and trivia to teach the layperson what certain Switch 2 tech jargon means and how the hardware works. Some of the minigames are as granular as a quiz where you try to identify the difference between a scene running between 20 fps and 120 fps. Another offers a perspective of what 4K resolution looks like compared to the size of Super Mario Bros. on the NES—a mere 256 x 240 pixels. Nintendo simplifies these terms and makes them comprehensible. The game is one of the better ways to come to terms with many of these technological terms. I think Nintendo made a big mistake not packaging Welcome Tour with the console. Instead, you have to pay $10 for it separately. Save for GameChat and mouse controls, the Switch 2 is a sequel console in every sense of the phrase. Mario Kart World may be a pretty game with some evocative animations for every powerslide and head-on collision with an incoming truck, but it's not the type of game to express the console's overt power. All that's left is specs. The Joy-Con 2 controllers are now big enough to fit adult-sized hands. The 1080p screen is brighter and more colorful than before, and we can't overstate the benefit of 4K support, especially as the screen resolution has become far more ubiquitous since 2017. That stuff matters, but Nintendo has the difficult task of ensuring everyone knows that matters. Consider how the original Switch lasted eight years. Even at release, it was an underpowered console. As of May, Nintendo sold 152.12 million original Switch units, closest to its top-selling device ever, the Nintendo DS. Since it had been around so long, it seemed like everybody had an original Switch. It was so ubiquitous I could visit any friend's house and expect they'd at least have two Joy-Cons and a copy of Mario Kart 8 Deluxe to play around with. Nintendo's original Switch has been around for eight years and still costs $300. The new Switch 2 is still largely untested and costs $150 more. What we still have yet to test is the new GameShare features. In some supported games, GameShare should let one Switch 2 share it for play with both original Switch and Switch 2 owners, even if they don't own that title. GameShare will only support a limited number of titles at launch, but it's a big reason why you should want to keep your eight-year-old console handy. The bigger Joy-Con 2s still support a similarly thin body that made the original so easy to schlep to a friend's house. Together, the features speak to Nintendo's real strength—its focus on playing with friends. After my limited time with it, I already feel that the Switch 2 does everything the original Switch did, but better. It's larger and more comfortable with improved controls. It's more capable of playing demanding games—though we'll need to test out those titles for ourselves to know the true scope of the Switch 2's potential. But as I played Mario Kart World with four-player co-op—even on a single Joy-Con 2 and even when the frame rate took a major hit from running in four-player splitscreen—I was catapulted back into the same sense of joy I have playing Mario Kart 8 or Super Smash Bros. with friends on the couch. New features like having a live view camera in multiplayer can enhance that feeling of community, and perhaps more games can incorporate mouse controls into multiplayer. The Switch shines as the communal console, and when gaming is getting more expensive, we just hope Nintendo can remember where its handheld console truly shines. See Nintendo Switch 2 at Walmart
CNN
an hour ago
- CNN
2 key findings on Democrats' brand problem from the new CNN poll
There's new evidence that the Democratic Party's reputation is in a bad place. That doesn't mean the party is doomed, electorally speaking. There's plenty of reason to doubt that, given lots of history and its performance in the 2025 elections thus far — but it is a complicating factor for the party's path forward. And a new CNN poll conducted by SSRS provides insights into the party's problems. It's worth a breakdown. The poll, which was released Sunday, asked a battery of questions about how people view both parties. Perhaps most striking was that people were more likely to view the Republicans than Democrats as the party with strong leaders (40% to 16%) and even the 'party of change' (32% to 25%). Neither party won close to a majority in either category. But the former is notable because there is such a gulf between the two parties. And the latter is notable because the party that's out of power is usually viewed as the party of change. Not this time. So what can we read into these findings? The 'strong leaders' question might be the most troublesome finding for Democrats. Only about 1 in 6 Americans said Democrats have stronger leaders than Republicans. As remarkably, only 39% of Democrats said that. We've seen hints of this in previous polls. A March CNN poll found about 3 in 10 Democrats and Democratic-leaning voters couldn't name a single leader who best reflected the party's core values. An AP-NORC poll last month showed just 35% of Democrats said they were at least 'somewhat' optimistic about the future of their party, compared with 55% of Republicans for their party. This might not seem too surprising. We just said goodbye to a Democratic president (Joe Biden) who was a diminished figure even when he was still in office. And the Democratic nominee who replaced him (Kamala Harris) wasn't exactly viewed as the future of the party when she took over the ticket in the 2024 race — and then lost. But there was a time when Democrats were at a somewhat similar crossroads, and the numbers weren't as dismal. A CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll asked the same question in 2006 — after John Kerry's unsuccessful emergence as Democrats' 2004 presidential candidate — and found a smaller 14-point advantage for Republicans. Back then, 63% of Democrats said their party had stronger leaders than Republicans — 24 points higher than today. One reason for the difference is that the 2025 and 2006 polls asked the question in a slightly different way, partly because one was conducted entirely by phone and the other mostly online. Today's poll gave people an explicit 'neither' option, which the 2006 poll didn't (though some people volunteered that option back then). Nearly half of Democrats in the new poll (48%) chose that option. That's still a remarkable finding. Combined with the 13% of Democrats who said Republicans have the stronger leaders, that's 6 in 10 Democrats this year who don't think their side has stronger leaders than a party led by a president whom a huge majority of them revile. The other notable finding is on which party is the 'party of change.' Americans chose Republicans, 32% to 25%. That's not a big gap, but it is counterintuitive given Republicans swept the House, Senate and White House last fall. Historically speaking, it's almost always the party that's out of power that's viewed as the party of change. Before the 2006 election, the same CNN-ORC poll mentioned above showed Democrats had a huge, 56% to 29% lead on this measure. Then, as now, Democrats didn't hold the presidency or either chamber of Congress. But the numbers are very different today. Not only do Democrats trail on this measure, but only a slight majority of Democrats themselves — 51% — say their party is the party of change. And only 18% of independents say that. It's likely this is, in part, about Democrats' failure to position themselves as change agents, but also about what President Donald Trump is doing — and about people not necessarily seeing 'change' as a good thing. However you feel about the changes Trump is making, there is no question he is pushing lots of them. You see that in his and the Department of Government Efficiency's rapid overhaul of the federal government and in Trump's historic efforts to expand executive power — in ways that are often being halted by the courts because they go too far, too fast. It's possible that people just see Trump changing lots of things, whether for good or ill in their opinions, so the 'party of change' mantle doesn't mean what it usually does. We already saw during the 2024 campaign that people's definitions of 'change' were somewhat jumbled by unusual circumstances — i.e., Harris replacing Biden, and a former president running as the challenger. But it's also pretty clear that Democrats have failed to make themselves into a viable and attractive alternative to the party in power. The new CNN poll also asked which party people viewed as the 'party that can get things done.' Republicans led on this by a nearly 2-to-1 margin, 36% to 19%. Only 49% of Democrats and 11% of independents picked the Democratic Party as the more formidable one. There's also, of course, Republicans' big edge on the 'strong leaders' question. None of this means Democrats are sunk in the 2026 elections — or anything close to it. History shows the party that doesn't hold the White House almost always wins midterm elections, in large part because they're viewed as a check on the president. Democrats and liberal candidates have also been doing well in special elections and other races held since the 2024 election. In other words, being not-Trump could be good enough to at least reclaim a very closely split House. But if the Democratic Party wants to run up the score in 2026 and really chart a path for the 2028 election, it has some real work to do on its branding.
