TravelManagers personal travel managers Kellie Grace and Patty Poutanen staged their first-ever Cairns Travel Expo in February 2025, which was a major success, drawing around 1,500 attendees and generating almost $500,000 in confirmed bookings.
Partner relationships were pivotal to the Cairns Travel Expo’s success with more than 30 major suppliers, including airlines, tourism boards and tour companies, represented at the event.
“Cairns Airport was a local standout. As well as attending on the day, they helped to spread the word by reaching out to their 50,000-strong database and posting about the expo on their social media accounts,” Grace said.
“The interest they generated had a massive snowball effect with more and more suppliers eager to take part.”
Grace said demand for holidays in Britain, Europe and Japan remains high, while the level of interest in cruise holidays has the pair already thinking about creating a separate expo event that focuses solely on cruise.
“Our goals for the expo were originally quite low-key: we wanted to generate new leads and enquiry while getting our names out in the community,” Grace said.
“We thought we might attract up to 500 attendees, but we ended up with around 1500 visitors throughout the day.
“In addition, almost 900 leads have opted to receive our newsletter.”
The expo was the first major collaborative effort by the two Cairns-based PTMs, who used their previous experience in large-scale event management with support from the National Partnership Office team.
TravelManagers held its annual conference in Cairns in 2024. Find out what happened firsthand here.
For more info, visit travelmanagers.com.au
