Anyone who’s worked a trade show floor knows the drill. You’re mid‑conversation. It’s a good one. Then someone appears out of nowhere, stamp card in hand, needing a box ticked before the clock runs out. At Entire Travel Group’s annual Showcase and Soirée in Sydney, that moment never came.
There were no stamp cards. No forced loops. No obligation to speak to every exhibitor just to stay in the running for a prize.
Entire Travel Group Sales and Marketing Director Greg McCallum says that was the point.
“There’s been this long‑held assumption that if you don’t incentivise travel advisors, they won’t engage,” McCallum says. “We don’t buy that.”
Letting conversations breathe
McCallum says removing passport-style games was about giving conversations room to actually happen.
“When a travel advisor is in the middle of a proper discussion, the last thing that helps is someone rushing in asking for a stamp,” he says.
The prize pool stayed in place, valued at more than $140,000 across the Showcase program. What changed was the pressure. Travel advisors were trusted to decide where their time was best spent.
The reaction was immediate.
“Exhibitors were raving about it,” McCallum says. “They were having better conversations, with the right people, for longer.”
Why timing matters
Entire Travel Group’s annual Showcase and Soirée is deliberately timed around how the selling year actually plays out.
McCallum says the industry calendar is packed through October, November and into December, then quietens through summer. February and March, by contrast, are when Northern Hemisphere planning kicks into gear and enquiries start to build.
The idea is to get travel advisors face‑to‑face with suppliers before that surge hits.
“If travel advisors leave knowing more than they did yesterday, they’re in a much stronger position for what comes next,” McCallum says.
Making hard things easier
McDonnell says the thinking behind the Showcase mirrors a broader goal across the business: making hard travel easier to sell, without dumbing it down.
Accoridng to McDonnell, the rise of AI has raised expectations around confidence and decision-making.
Clients are arriving with itineraries pulled from prompts and screenshots, but that doesn’t make the work simpler. It raises the bar. Travel advisors are expected to sense‑check, refine and take responsibility for decisions that look easy on paper and can fall apart in real life.
That’s where McDonnell says specialist support matters.
Giving a travel advisor access to someone who sells one destination, has lived it, and understands the sequencing, trade‑offs and risks, helps advisors look assured rather than defensive.
“These events exist to do exactly that,” he says. “To make the hard stuff feel manageable, so travel advisors can focus on the client, not the mechanics.”
Confidence looks like speed
McDonnell points to speed as one of the clearest signs of confidence.
He uses a pre‑built Switzerland rail itinerary as an example. The 14‑night journey includes more than 30 individual services.
A travel advisor can select dates, generate a branded quote and send it to a client in minutes.
“That’s a $20,000 booking done properly, without guesswork,” McDonnell says.
Behind that sits destination‑specific teams who sell only the regions they cover, many with years of lived and selling experience.
The goal, McDonnell says, is to take friction out of the process without taking judgement away from the advisor.
A format that matches the job
This year’s Travel Showcase & Soirées brought together more than 1,000 travel advisors across Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, making it the largest B2B retail travel exhibition of its kind in Australia.
Launched in February 2024 as a way to kick-start the selling season, the Showcase has grown quickly. The inaugural events drew 600 travel advisors and 35 exhibitors. This year, 65 operators and tourism offices took part, many travelling to Australia specifically for the program.
The format combines a supplier exhibition with networking sessions, food, music and a prize pool of more than $140,000, without forcing advisors into prescribed pathways.
McCallum says Entire Travel Group expects the Showcase and Soirées to continue to grow, with plans for further expansion in 2027.
To find out what events are coming up soon (or to upload your own event), visit Karryon’s Event Calendar.
KARRYON UNPACKS: Entire Travel Group has reshaped its Showcase events around trust and education, removing stamp cards while scaling the country’s largest independent B2B travel exhibition.
