Travel Counsellors acquires Planisto, EURAM’s award-winning travel technology platform. Four members of the main development team will join Travel Counsellors, including Vincent Hekkert, long-time business development director of EURAM. This is the second acquisition for the Travel Counsellors Group in its nearly 30-year history. The first was the acquisition of British ZRA organisation Holidaysplease in March 2023. This second step, according to Travel Counsellors, confirms the company’s focus on the premium travel market. The organization is making this move after a record £933 million in bookings revenue and a 23 per cent increase over the previous year, Travel Counsellors said in a statement. As is well known, the originally Belgian company EURAM filed for bankruptcy at the end of December last year. Shortly after the corona pandemic in 2022, EURAM was on the verge of rolling out its Planisto platform for tailor-made travel to the broad travel market. The company was actively looking for external investors for this purpose. That didn’t work out at the last minute last December. Planisto, a so-called cloud-native technology platform, enables travel advisors to create complex, personalized itineraries for clients. The platform allows tailor-made trips to be put together with multiple destinations in one trip. The acquisition of Planisto comes on the heels of Travel Counsellors’ annual global conference last November, where the company announced a £15 million technology investment for 2024. The emphasis would be on the further development of software for tailor-made trips in the company’s own digital platform Phenix, which is used exclusively by the affiliated Travel Counsellors. The integration of Planisto’s software into Phenix will now accelerate this technical development. ‘This platform is a great addition to the existing digital tools of Travel Counsellors’, says Fred van Eijk, founder and Managing Director of Travel Counsellors Netherlands and Belgium when asked by TravMagazine. ‘It would take a lot of time, money and manpower to develop something like this ourselves. With this acquisition, we are taking a huge step forward.’ Many affiliated Travel Counsellors in the Netherlands and Belgium have already used the Planisto software, says Van Eijk.
“The system has a proven track record of success and is being used by us to support the strong position of the 2,000 Travel Counsellors worldwide.” At the same time as the acquisition of the Planisto platform and the intellectual property, Travel Counsellors also welcomes a number of colleagues who have contributed to the creation and development of the platform. They are Vincent Hekkert (business development), Carmen Dils (who has worked at EURAM since its foundation in 1990), Tom Allard (developer of Planisto) and a fourth colleague who worked as a developer at EURAM. 
Photo: Vincent Hekkert. Van Eijk says he is ‘very happy’ with the arrival of Hekkert, the face of EURAM in the Netherlands. ‘He has a lot of added value for our management team in The Hague. He will fulfill the same role at Travel Counsellors as he had at EURAM, only now he will coach the 2,000 affiliated Travel Counsellors worldwide. I also have respect for founder Peter Keijers, as a person and entrepreneur, who has created something beautiful with EURAM.’ The four EURAM employees will join the current technology team of Travel Counsellors, with a focus on the development of travel routes and the development of the platform. “We are very pleased with Planisto, which we have had our eye on for some time, and with the hugely talented team behind its success,” said Steve Byrne, CEO of Travel Counsellors. “This acquisition aligns perfectly with our vision to build a community of the very best personal travel entrepreneurs, supported by state-of-the-art technology to provide our customers with tailored and personalized travel experiences.” He continued: “In addition to strengthening our own technology and talent within the organization, the acquisition will further accelerate the development of the current itineraries in the Phenix platform and enhance the end customer’s booking experience. The acquisition supports our growth strategy as it accelerates our development into a platform valued at over £1 billion in the very near future. We are committed to investing in our scalable technology and operating model. We look forward to the future with confidence.” Fred van Eijk, CEO of Travel Counsellors Netherlands and Belgium, adds: ‘Our Travel Counsellors have been working with the Planisto platform for years with great enthusiasm and great satisfaction. We are therefore incredibly happy with this acquisition. In addition, we look forward to working with the people who have developed this great platform and promoted it to what it is today.’ Photo: Fred van Eijk, managing director of Travel Counsellors Netherlands and Belgium, with CEO Steve Byrne (Archive photo TravMagazine).
