Something Bigger than Airline Representation & GSA Services for New Markets Is Brewing at Anjuna

If you have ever wondered why supermarkets put the milk at the back of the store, there is a surprisingly useful lesson in there about travel.

When we were launching Expedia in the late 1990s, we used to talk about the milk-at-the-back-of-the-supermarket analogy.

Milk is something many people enter a supermarket specifically to buy, yet you normally have to walk through much of the store before reaching it, passing bread, cereal, coffee and dozens of other things that happen to make sense alongside the purchase that brought you there in the first place.

The supermarket is not telling you what to buy, it is simply putting related choices within reach and allowing you to decide what is useful.

Travel has always worked in much the same way.

Someone may begin by searching for an airline seat, but very few people actually want an airline seat for its own sake.

They want to go somewhere, and once that decision has been made, other questions quickly follow: where should I stay, what should I know about the destination, how will I get around, what happens if my booking changes, and who will help me if something does not go according to plan?

More than 25 years ago, I watched the emerging online travel industry begin connecting those decisions in new ways, and recently I have found myself thinking about that same idea again, this time through the lens of Anjuna.

Because something bigger has been brewing here, although I would hesitate to describe it as something that suddenly appeared.

Anjuna began in Australia in 2003 with airlines at the centre of our business, then, over the following years, our footprint gradually expanded.

We established our global headquarters in Singapore and extended further into Australasia in 2016, opened six offices across the United States and Canada in 2017, moved into Africa in 2019 and, in 2023, established our first borderless product support centre in Fiji.

Today, our network extends across 21 locations, eight countries and 12 time zones.

I mention that history because these new areas of activity would be much harder to understand without it.

Every time Anjuna entered another market, we did more than open another location.

We built local knowledge, developed relationships, learned how distribution worked there, understood how different customers behaved and created infrastructure that our partners could access without having to reproduce all of it themselves.

Eventually, the conversations around that infrastructure began to change.

An airline conversation would lead to a question about generating demand for a destination, a destination conversation would lead towards hotels and accommodation, while commercial activity would increasingly create questions around reservations, fares, ticketing, reporting, disruption support and customer service.

The subjects were different, but underneath them we kept finding the same people, the same markets, the same relationships and, increasingly, the same infrastructure.

That is where the next chapter of Anjuna really began.

Anjuna Service Center Plus: The Infrastructure Behind the Journey

The travel industry naturally spends a lot of time talking about acquiring customers.

We talk about routes, marketing, bookings and revenue, but the relationship does not stop when somebody presses “pay.”

In many ways, that is where another type of work begins.

Reservations need to be serviced, tickets need to be issued and sometimes reissued, refunds have to be managed, fares need to be maintained, trade partners need support, BSP activity needs oversight and management needs reliable information about what is happening across the operation.

When disruption occurs, all of those requirements can become considerably more urgent.

This was part of the thinking behind our product support centre in Fiji, which we established in 2023 and which has since developed into Anjuna Service Center Plus, or ASC+.

ASC+ brings four principal areas together: borderless customer service, ATPCO and NDC fare support, BSP management and management information reporting.

Around those core areas sit capabilities including reservations, ticketing, refunds, reissues, queue management, trade servicing, disruption assistance, revenue recovery and upselling.

That might sound like a very broad menu, and deliberately so, because the point is not that every airline should use every part of it.

One carrier might need additional customer-service capability but already manage BSP perfectly well internally.

Another might need support with fares and reporting.

Another may want a broader solution covering several functions.

ASC+ can therefore be modular, allowing a partner to use the capabilities that solve an actual problem rather than being forced into an all-or-nothing package.

For me, however, the most interesting part is the logistics behind it.

An airline operating across several markets could theoretically create a separate support structure in every country, appoint different suppliers for different functions and manage each relationship independently.

But every new supplier or duplicated function brings something with it: another contract, another reporting line, another system, another management process and another cost.

Our network gives us the opportunity to organise that differently.

Functions that genuinely depend on local knowledge can stay close to the local market, while functions that can be delivered centrally can use infrastructure such as Fiji and the wider Anjuna network.

The information can still move between them.

A local commercial team can remain connected to customer support, fare activity, reporting and distribution functions elsewhere in the organisation, while the airline avoids rebuilding the same capability every time it enters another territory.

That is what borderless means in practical terms.

Not pretending borders have disappeared, because they have not.

It means recognising which parts of the business benefit from being local and which parts become more efficient when they are connected across markets.

There is a financial logic to that as well.

Based on our activities and studies so far, we have seen opportunities for partners using this wider approach to achieve distribution cost savings of up to 20%.

Naturally, the number will depend on the partner, the markets involved and which capabilities are being used, but the thinking behind it is fairly simple.

If infrastructure already exists, why build it again?

If the market knowledge is already there, why pay to rediscover it?

If one network can support several connected functions, why automatically create several disconnected ones?

Sometimes reducing cost is not about asking someone to perform exactly the same job for less money.

It is about finding work that never needed to be duplicated in the first place.

But infrastructure like that only matters once an airline has a reason to be in a market at all, and that is where the story really begins.

Anjuna Airline Solutions: Airline Representation & GSA Services for New Markets as the Starting Point

Airlines remain fundamental to the Anjuna story because much of what we know about international markets has been learned by helping airlines operate within them.

The challenge is fairly straightforward: entering a new market can become expensive long before meaningful revenue starts arriving.

An airline may need people on the ground, commercial relationships, sales and marketing activity, distribution expertise, market intelligence, customer support and an understanding of how business is actually done locally.

It may also need help with fares, ticketing, reporting and other functions that sit behind the commercial operation.

Of course, an airline can build all of that itself, and sometimes it absolutely should.

But there are also situations where constructing an entire operation before the market has proved itself creates a lot of fixed cost and unnecessary risk.

Anjuna Airline Solutions is designed to provide Airline Representation & GSA Services for New Markets another route in.

Instead of beginning with an empty office and recreating every function from the ground up, an airline can access local teams, established relationships, distribution knowledge and commercial expertise that are already operating in the market.

The objective is practical: help the airline start doing business, understand the market and build revenue without first having to build everything around it.

What has become more interesting over the years is what sits behind that local team.

A team in Canada knows Canada, while colleagues in Africa know their markets and our teams across Asia-Pacific bring another set of relationships and experience. The real value comes when those local capabilities are connected rather than operating as isolated offices.

That gives us the ability to separate two things that are often unnecessarily bundled together: what genuinely needs to happen locally and what simply needs to happen well.

Sales relationships may need to be local. Market intelligence certainly benefits from people who understand the country, the culture and the customer.

Some support functions, however, do not need to be recreated market by market.

That becomes especially relevant when an airline is developing several territories at once. Instead of appointing separate structures for every function in every country, parts of the operation can draw on the wider Anjuna network, while the work that depends on genuine local knowledge remains close to the market.

That combination of market access and shared infrastructure has become one of the foundations for everything else we are now doing.

It has also changed the questions we are asked.

Because once you start talking about selling more seats, sooner or later somebody asks the obvious question:

Where are those extra passengers actually going to come from?

Anjuna Destination Solutions: Moving From Attention to Arrivals

A destination can be extraordinary and still struggle to turn attention into actual visitors.

There is a considerable distance between somebody seeing a beautiful photograph of Fiji, Mauritius or Malaysia and that same person eventually arriving at the airport with a confirmed booking.

Advertising can create awareness, but awareness is only one part of the journey.

A destination trying to grow from a particular international source market needs to understand how that market works, who influences travel decisions, how the destination is perceived, which travel partners are capable of selling it, what barriers may be holding demand back and, importantly, whether the right air access exists to support the opportunity.

That is where Anjuna Destination Solutions fits.

At its simplest, ADS helps destinations build stronger commercial presence in the markets from which they want more visitors.

That can include local representation, trade activation, marketing support, market intelligence, media engagement, airline relationships and route-development conversations, with the intention of moving the discussion beyond “How do we get more people to see our destination?” towards the much more useful question, “How do we get more people to actually travel there?”

For me, that distinction is important.

It is relatively easy to measure impressions, clicks or campaign reach. It is much harder to understand why a traveller in one country is or is not converting that interest into a booking.

That requires people close to the market.

If a destination wants to grow in Canada, for example, we are not trying to understand Canada from thousands of kilometres away. We already have people there, relationships there and experience of how the travel market operates.

Those teams can speak to the trade, listen to what the market is saying, identify opportunities and feed that intelligence back into the destination strategy.

Then there is the airline connection.

A destination cannot grow international arrivals indefinitely without access, while an airline cannot sustainably operate a route without demand.

Those two sides should be speaking to each other.

Anjuna’s aviation background allows Destination Solutions to bring airline conversations into the wider destination-development picture, whether that involves understanding existing capacity, exploring potential routes, supporting a new service or simply making sure demand-generation activity is aligned with the ways travellers can actually reach the destination.

This is also where the wider Anjuna footprint becomes useful.

Local intelligence can come from one market, specialist expertise can sit somewhere else, airline relationships can be drawn into the discussion when relevant, while the destination receives a much more connected picture of what is happening.

In other words, the destination does not simply gain another marketing supplier.

It gains access to a market.

And once the market starts responding, the next question is usually quite predictable.

Where are all those visitors going to stay?

Anjuna Hotel Solutions: Giving Hotels a Route Into New Markets

Hotels have always sat very close to the airline business, even when aviation and hospitality have treated themselves as completely separate sectors.

Travellers do not make that distinction.

Nobody planning a week in Vietnam thinks, “I have finished organising the aviation component, now I shall move on to the hospitality sector.”

They are organising one trip.

The flight gets them there, the hotel gives them somewhere to stay, the destination gives them a reason to go in the first place, and all of those decisions influence one another.

The commercial problem for hotels is also surprisingly similar to the one airlines face.

A hotel may be excellent, well known domestically and successful in its home market, but that does not mean it automatically knows how to generate business from Canada, Australia, the United States or another international source market.

International demand requires more than putting an advertisement in front of somebody.

A hotel needs to understand who is travelling to its destination, how they are booking, which segments are growing, which commercial relationships influence those bookings, how the property should be positioned and what travellers in one source market value compared with travellers somewhere else.

Anjuna Hotel Solutions is designed to provide that market access.

Rather than a hotel having to construct an independent sales presence in every country it wants to develop, AHS can use the relationships, local teams, commercial experience and wider travel-industry network that Anjuna has already built.

This is where the cross-functionality between the solutions becomes particularly interesting.

Our airline activity has spent years putting us close to travel distribution and commercial relationships, while Destination Solutions takes us further into source-market development and tourism demand. Hotels naturally sit between those two worlds.

If we are already supporting a destination, accommodation is an important part of the proposition that destination is taking to market.

If we are already working with an airline carrying travellers into that destination, there may be an opportunity to connect relevant hotels with the same market.

And if a hotel wants to develop a country where Anjuna already operates, it can potentially benefit from market knowledge and relationships that do not need to be rebuilt from zero.

That is where the old Expedia idea comes back into the picture.

You can call it bundling, you can call it cross-selling, but fundamentally it is about recognising that related needs already sit beside one another.

What I do not want that to mean is Anjuna becoming an online travel agency or a package-holiday provider.

We are not here to tell somebody which airline they must fly, which hotel they must book or what their itinerary should look like.

Our role is to provide information, access and opportunity.

We might know the destination, we might work with an airline serving it and we might have a hotel relationship that fits, so why would we hide those connections from one another?

Put the information within reach, then allow the partner, trade professional or traveller to decide whether it is useful.

Very much like the supermarket.

Of course, there is another side to the journey, one that rarely appears in the holiday photographs.

Something changes.

A flight is delayed, a booking needs to be amended, a fare needs attention or somebody needs help.

That is exactly what Anjuna Service Center Plus is built for, and it is also where all four pieces of this story start to come together.

And this brings me back to the milk.

When we talked about that supermarket analogy at Expedia all those years ago, the interesting part was never really where the milk was located.

It was understanding that one need usually sits close to another.

Travel works the same way.

A destination needs access.

An airline needs demand.

A hotel needs travellers.

And once the traveller has booked, the airline needs the infrastructure to keep the journey working.

For a long time, the industry has been very good at putting those things into separate boxes, separate contracts and separate organisations, even though the person actually travelling experiences them as one connected journey.

Anjuna started with one part of that journey in Australia in 2003.

Then we entered more markets, built more relationships, added more people and created more infrastructure. Our airline work brought us closer to destinations, destinations brought us closer to hotels, while our operational development in Fiji created another way to support

what happens behind the booking.

Now those pieces are starting to meet.

Airline Solutions gives us the aviation and market foundation.

Destination Solutions uses that market access to help turn interest into demand.

Hotel Solutions connects accommodation with those same source markets and travel relationships.

ASC+ provides many of the service, distribution and commercial functions supporting the journey behind the scenes.

Each solution can work perfectly well on its own, and for many partners that will be exactly the right arrangement.

But when the needs overlap, we do not necessarily have to start again.

The people may already be there.

The relationships may already be there.

The market access may already be there.

And increasingly, the infrastructure is there too.

So yes, something bigger has been brewing at Anjuna.

We just did not put all the ingredients together yesterday.

We have been collecting them since 2003.