Steffen Boehnke · Director Airtours

"With Airtours Discovery, we want to show our travel agency partners a destination – on the one hand our amazing hotel partners, but also to put the destination itself in the spotlight. At the same time, it’s always a way of saying thank you to our top advisors. Discovery is our biggest event of the year, into which we invest not only a lot of love and passion, but also our largest budget – and we do that very gladly. We also have our annual Airtours Future Event, which is much smaller and purely strategic in nature – it’s less about experiencing a destination. For Airtours Discovery, we choose destinations that are highly relevant for the travel industry and where there is something new happening in the luxury segment. The last time we were in Marrakech was eleven and a half years ago, and so much has changed here – especially in terms of hotel openings. It’s a fascinating city with so much to offer, and we have fantastic hotel partners on site. At the moment, the destination also fits well with the overall geopolitical situation. What I’m particularly pleased about is that many participants told us they had never been to Marrakech before: nearly 60 percent are here for the first time, and 40 percent are even visiting Morocco for the first time – that’s perfect! In addition, I also have the opportunity to have conversations that you often don’t get to have in day-to-day business. A phone call or a Teams meeting is simply not the same as sitting together here in a pleasant setting and exchanging ideas. We are convinced that we had so few cancellations despite the current number of rebookings for Middle East flights because we sent out invitations very early and were a bit lucky with the timing. There were certainly questions and concerns about whether this event would take place at all. For us, it’s a great sign of appreciation that so many people are here. We’re not revealing where we’ll be going next time just yet, but of course we’re already working on plans for next year. What we’re very happy about is that partners are now approaching us and asking if we might come to them. It has clearly been shown that a Discovery event increases bookings to the respective destination – for example, in Mauritius, where we were most recently, we’re seeing a strong increase.

I’m very happy with how this event has gone – everything on site worked exactly as planned, and that makes me very proud of our team, because in the end, it’s their success that made all of this possible. And for that, I’m very grateful."