Tourico Holidays recruits top-end talent in Asia to fuel next generation of leadership

SHANGHAI – Tourico Holidays, a global leader in wholesale travel brokerage, announced that the number of applicants from Asia for the Tourico Holidays Travel Academy have tripled in the last year, outpacing all other places of origin. Over the next two Academy sessions, more than 50 students of Asian origin – totaling more than 41% of the entire student population – will attend, including many recent college graduates.
 

The Tourico Travel Academy, which launched in January of 2014, provides career-oriented professionals with valuable industry knowledge, technology experience, and business negotiation skills that are taught personally by company executives – including a two-week lesson from the CEO of Tourico, Uri Argov. In the first two years, the Academy has received more than 7,200 total applicants, including 1,550 from Ivy League graduates. Of the massive candidate pool, only 187 students, or 2%, have been accepted into the program. The size of the program will double in 2016 to over 280 students – and to a total of 750 students per year by 2018.
 

“Over a quarter of our total Travel Academy graduates thus far have been students hailing from Asia– and they have all gone on to be vital employees within the company,” said Kieran Le-Petit, Director of Global Recruitment for Tourico Holidays. “For example, Xinxin Ou and Jiarui Li, graduates from our second session, are now leading key-account teams.”
 

Accepted students to the Academy receive a base pay during the 10-week course, full benefits, housing, a meal plan, and laptops. Upon completion of the program, graduates will have the opportunity to join the global travel wholesaler and be a part of a Billion dollar company that has offices throughout the world.
 

Tourico opened a new office in Shanghai in October 2015, serving as the company’s technology hub for the Asia-Pacific region, and will open another two in Shenzhen or Guangzhou and Chengdu in 2016 to better support its local partners. Adding additional dedicated and highly trained employees in China will allow Tourico’s supplier and distribution clients in the region to get the professional assistance needed to reach their full potential.
 

“As we increase our hands-on assistance and leadership in China and throughout Asia, we thought, who better to drive this change than hand picked, qualified students from the region that have been trained in-house by company executives,” said Le-Petit.