Signature Travel Network’s Karl Kannstadter Talks Exploration Travel, and How He’s Helping Advisors Sell It

As a child growing up in Toronto, Karl Kannstadter was a regular visitor to Toronto Pearson International Airport. He’d go with his parents, plus other cousins who lived nearby, and run around in the waiting room until his grandparents from Belgium or his grandmother from Germany walked through the double doors.

“I was fascinated by all of it,” Kannstadter recalls. “And I wasn’t even thinking of the science of it, just the fact that they had transported themselves from one place to another.”

Fast forward some years, and Kannstadter — now the vice president of content strategy, exploration, for travel advisor consortium Signature Travel Network — is dedicated to helping people be and feel transported. And ideally, they’re being transformed, too, by visiting a destination that offers something new or challenges them in some way.

We spoke with the professional explorer about his career leading up to his new role, and how he’s helping travel advisors guide clients to the adventures just right for them.

Before you arrived at Signature, you worked at Silversea Cruises for more than five years. What were some of your biggest takeaways, or lessons from your time there?

It was realizing that I'm much more comfortable in front of an audience than I ever thought I was, and particularly when it comes to speaking about travel, and expedition cruise in the case of Silversea. [Before that, I was] at Quark, and I was much more behind-the-scenes as a product director. When I went to Silversea, I was asked to work in sales, [and to talk] about expedition destinations. 

I could speak to many of them from my experience with the polar regions at Quark and through my personal experience — I ran a dive shop in Fiji, I spent three months in Papua New Guinea, I lived in Brazil for a year. All of these are places Silversea goes to. It took me about six months to find my rhythm, but then it clicked: I was absolutely comfortable talking to 200 people about a destination. I wasn’t selling them anything — at least it never felt that way. I would modify my presentation slide decks, peppering them with my own images; it was that much more authentic and credible to see me in the destination myself. I wasn’t just saying this about Antarctica or the Galapagos Islands, I’d actually experienced it myself. 

Exploration travel is about pushing yourself, whether that’s getting a little cold or hot and sweaty, or getting penguin guano on your boot.

Now at Signature, you continue to specialize in exploration. What does exploration travel mean today, based on what you’re seeing?

This intersection of luxury and exploration is absolutely happening, so I think exploration travel is much more comfortable. There’s a whole group of people to whom the idea of going more remote and getting outside of your comfort zone is appealing, but they don’t want to give up on those creature comforts they’ve gotten used to. If you’re a Four Seasons [Resorts-style] traveler, you can still do those things and come back to a cool towel at the lodge, and there’s a cool drink and suite where you can have anything you want.

But exploration travel is about pushing yourself, whether that’s getting a little cold, or hot and sweaty, or getting some penguin guano on your boot. In the Galapagos, in Antarctica, you’ll be closer to wildlife than you’ve ever been in your life, and maybe closer than you’re comfortable being. But you get over it, because you're in that moment, and in that place, and you’re part of the environment at that point.

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I hosted a group of 21 travel advisors on Silversea to Antarctica in November. I was hyping up the [polar] plunge. We got there, and some, upon arrival, said “Absolutely not.” But then the music goes on, the adult beverages are flowing, people are in their robes and goofy outfits and the first people start plunging. They come back, and yeah, they’re cold, but they didn’t die. Then other people change their minds. Then they do the plunge, they come out and they’re just beaming. It’s a personal achievement — something they never thought they would do, and there’s the rush of it after. It is transformational, in a way. 

At Signature’s last conference in Las Vegas, you said that your role is really to ‘elevate the awareness of what the possibilities are,’ in terms of exploration travel. What does the range of this type of travel look like today?

One of the workshops I did at the sales conference was on the breadth of our portfolio, looking at our list of preferred partners. And there are things from the Grand Canyon to outer space. 

Look at Backroads, for example, MT Sobek and others — they have U.S.-based programs. So, if you’ve never been to the Grand Canyon before —  or even if you have, but just to the parking lot at the South Rim, and then you looked down from the rim — you have options. Do you want to hike, rim to rim? Do you want to raft in the canyon and stay at the lodge down below? Look at the multisport adventures and what they pack into a three-night/four-day package, even as close as the Grand Canyon, or Hawaii. It does not have to be far.

I want to help advisors feel comfortable asking the questions they should be asking, of partners and of clients.

And then, going just slightly further afield, think about the Galapagos Islands, which is accessible but a world away once you’re there. If you’re in south Florida, it’s a 3.5-hour flight from Miami to Quito, where you can take a breath and experience the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Old Quito. Then it’s another two-hour flight to the islands, 97% of it undeveloped, most of it  a marine reserve. You are in a remote and extreme part of the world, but it didn’t take all that long to get there. And, for most of us in North America, you’ve got maybe a two-hour time change.

So how are you helping advisors navigate this amazing breadth of Signature’s portfolio?

There are so many products out there: cruise lines, companies offering safaris in East Africa, companies offering bicycle tours. There’s so much to choose from, so — and this is no slight to the travel advisor — advisors don’t know what they don’t know. And it must be overwhelming for them.

They may have an inclination of what expedition cruising is, or what life on safari is like, for example, but do they really understand it? And if they don’t understand it, they might not be comfortable talking about it. And then how can they promote it? They’ll likely drift toward the things they're more comfortable with.

So, in my role, I aim to find out the gaps in their knowledge, and then I work with partners to make that information more accessible and digestible. One of the things I was challenged by at Silversea was that whenever an advisor would call, with clients interested in, say, the Arctic, they’d ask what the differences were between Silversea, Quark, etc. So I created a spreadsheet of expedition cruise partners, with everyone from G Adventures to Seabourn, just to help them understand things like guest capacity, the ice class of the vessels, how many Zodiacs [each has], how many kayaks, the guide-to-guest ratio, etc. It’s an 88 data point spreadsheet. The companies filled this out for every ship — you can imagine how long it took. But then I picked the 15 data points in the overview that I felt were most relevant. 

In my role, I aim to find out the gaps in [an advisor's] knowledge, and then I work with partners to make that information more accessible and digestible.

So now, here’s a tool [advisors] can use, and [they] can even white label it. Put [their] logo on it, and send it to clients who are contemplating an expedition. Then, if they need me on a call, great. If they need a business development manager on the call, fine. It’s about reminding them about the tools at their disposal, and then if there aren’t tools, creating those tools. 

And I want to help them feel comfortable asking the questions they should be asking, of partners and of clients. On the spreadsheet I made, too, I asked our partners, “Who’s the right client for this product?” And, “Who’s the wrong client for this product?” It’s in nobody’s best interest to send the wrong client on the wrong program at the wrong time of year for the wrong reasons. So, I encourage advisors to ask all the questions.

Are there any new-to-you exploration opportunities that have caught your attention in your first year in this role? And then once you discover something, how do you raise advisor awareness?

Absolutely — Raja Ampat, which I mentioned earlier. I’ve had my PADI certification for 30 years now, but I’d sort of only done the traditional diving spots: Mexico, the Great Barrier Reef. But I was invited by Aqua Expeditions, one of our preferred partners, to go to Raja Ampat. And I didn’t know that the underwater world could look like that, from the variety of soft corals, the variety of hard corals, and there’s so much of it — if you can call coral ‘lush,’ these coral are lush, and it’s remarkable.  This is where the Pacific Ocean and the Indian Ocean come together. 

At the end of 2023, I went to a lot of the expedition/exploration partners, and I asked them what they’re excited about. The CEO of Mt. Sobek is excited about going back to Bhutan, and to Nepal; the Himalayas were popular in the 90s, and it’s coming around again. Backroads has hiking tours in Iran and Iraq — sometimes, what was off-limits for so long comes back on the table. And I hope we’ll say the same about Russia in 20 years, so people will be going back to St. Petersburg and Siberia, or doing the Trans-Siberian again. 

It’s in nobody’s best interest to send the wrong client on the wrong program at the wrong time of year for the wrong reasons.

Post-pandemic, are you continuing to see a “You can’t take it with you” attitude? Because that attitude seems to lend itself to adventure travel — to trying new things and exploring new places.

Absolutely. Anecdotally, when I was with Silversea, in 2021 (which we were not expecting to be a particularly good year), at our end-of-the-year sales meeting, the team shared that revenues were up, but passenger counts were down. We scratched our heads, then realized: Travelers are taking longer trips, and they're going in higher category suites. They’re spending the money, and to your point, it was that “you only live once” thinking. They’re going, they’re spending more time in the destination or on the ship, and they’re splurging on category upgrades or the five-star safari lodge. We see more families, and in private groups. I’m hearing about advisors working on such trips — trips that may not have happened with those clients before.

Any other words for advisors?

Don’t let words like “expedition,” “adventure” or “exploration” skew your opinion. Dig a little bit deeper, and I think you’ll see that any product described with some of those words is often much more accessible than you might think.