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Canada ended this summer’s Olympics with a haul of nine golds, seven silvers and 11 bronzes, which saw it finish 12th in the medal table. While Canadians were busy celebrating the country’s second-best ever total haul at the Games, few would have given much thought to the extensive work needed to get the team to Paris.
That responsibility fell to ATPI. As the official travel provider for the Canadian Olympic Committee (COC), the global travel and events specialist was in charge of the logistics for getting an Olympic delegation of more than 700 people to the French capital.
Such an undertaking required meticulous preparation. For starters, Canada’s various provinces meant arranging flights out of multiple airports, while extra bookings were needed for teams that had opted to hold preseason training camps in other European countries before heading on to Paris.
“Usually what we do is in and out,” Kevin Perrin, ATPI’s global head of commercial for sports business, tells SportsPro. “We arrange travel from Canada to the host city and then back. But Paris 2024 was more complex. It was a bit of an eye-opener.”
Fortunately for ATPI, it had ample experience to call on. Having worked with the COC during Tokyo 2020, it had already shown it was capable of navigating even the most unprecedented travel circumstances with the various Covid-19 restrictions in place in Japan at the time. For that event, eventually held in 2021, ATPI was able to successfully take Team Canada’s athletes, which at more than 500 was the largest cohort the country had sent to an Olympics since Los Angeles 1984, to Tokyo.
The company also worked with the COC for Pyeongchang 2018 and Beijing 2022, while its client base includes the likes of soccer federation Concacaf, the Professional Women’s Hockey League (PWHL) and British Wheelchair Basketball (BWB).
For Paris 2024, Perrin says planning flights began nearly a year in advance. But that was just one part of ATPI’s remit, which extended to building hospitality programmes for the COC’s commercial partners such as Air Canada, Bell and Lululemon. ATPI’s role at the Games also involved laying on travel during competition as part of a mandate from the local organising committee.
“Both the men’s and women’s football tournaments were played in different stadiums around France, for example,” explains Perrin. “We were tasked with planning and making those bookings for athletes, for media, for the officials, for anti-doping, for IOC guests. Anything that involved train or air during the Games was us.
“We started working with [the local organising committee] a year and a half, two years in advance when they staged test competitions in France. We were tasked to plan the logistics of them.”
ATPI led the logistics for getting Canada’s Olympic delegation of more than 700 people to Paris for this summer’s Olympic Games (Image credit: Getty Images)
‘Technology moves so fast, yet the travel industry doesn’t’
Paris 2024 might have come to an end, but Perrin has had little time to catch his breath. ATPI is already working with the COC ahead of the Milano-Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics, as well as the city of Montréal, which is hosting cycling’s UCI Road World Championships in two years’ time. The countdown is also on for the 2024/25 PWHL campaign on 30th November, which features an expanded 30-game schedule for each team, while preparations are well underway for the Canada Games multi-sport event in 2025.
“It never stops,” says a smiling Perrin.
With an emphasis on enhancing the athlete experience at events, ATPI is keeping tabs on new technologies that can make its work more efficient and seamless. The firm has a team of programmers responsible for that and Perrin also keeps an eye out for new tech at trade shows.
Ultimately, ATPI knows it has to keep pace with a changing world as new innovations such as artificial intelligence (AI), 5G, and many other technologies come to the fore, especially because they have the potential to impact the travel industry in the future.
“It’s so important because technology moves so fast, yet the travel industry doesn’t,” Perrin notes. “Most of the airlines are on different platforms. The software around our industry is different.
“There are approximately ten different booking tools that we use. On the event side, which is where we concentrate, we were able to work out a few different platforms with different specialties and we integrated them all together so that it works seamlessly.”
ATPI also offers an all-in-one travel dashboard that provides a single platform to access, control and manage all business travel. That dashboard can also be tailored for a specific organisation, with features ranging from travel management to data-driven insights in areas such as sustainability.
Going the extra mile
Arranging flights for hundreds of athletes may be ATPI’s bread and butter, but air travel is under the microscope amid increased pressure from wider society to operate more sustainably. According to Perrin, implementing positive change starts from within an organisation, which is why ATPI has an internal programme that includes measuring staff’s carbon footprint for how they travel to work.
Sustainability efforts also extend to ‘ATPI Halo’, which is a CO2 measurement, reduction and compensation service that enables clients to offset their carbon footprint though various projects. The company’s environmental strategy has been inspired by the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
“We measure every single mile that [clients] do, whether it’s by train or air, and report that back to them,” says Perrin. “We’re able to give them their carbon emissions and most of them will have a programme in place to offset.”
Of course, sustainability isn’t limited to the environment. It is a wide-ranging term that also encompasses social impact and long-term economic viability. This has prompted ATPI to develop ‘ATPI Evolve’, a strategic vision that addresses objectives considered meaningful to the company across environment, social and governance (ESG). Initiatives range from responsible procurement of services to embedding equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) throughout the organisation.
Kevin Perrin, ATPI’s global head of commercial for sports business, says the travel and events specialist takes pride in knowing “there’s a little piece of us” in an athlete’s success
Supporting the PWHL and other new leagues
Having worked with the PWHL on its inaugural season, ATPI wants to continue supporting the growth of women’s sport in Canada.
Next year will see the launch of the Northern Super League (NSL), which has been co-founded by former Canada women’s international Diana Matheson and is promising a ‘new era’ for domestic professional women’s soccer in the country, with ATPI ready to lend its expertise.
“We did that for the PWHL,” says Perrin. “They called on us right from the get-go. We were able to give them our suggestions and proposals on how to put together a travel programme.
“It started out with air travel. Now it’s hotel reservations, coordinating food and beverage once they’re in those hotels, getting them to the game, local transfers.
“All of that came to us after [we first started working with the PWHL]. That trust was installed in us and that’s the part that we love. Our expertise and our specialties can bring a lot of value to [a new league] when they start off. But it can be a [national governing] body, an international federation, a national federation, a provincial federation.”
Adapting to fresh demands
Perrin believes that the “globalisation of sport” has made travel an even more integral part of an organisation’s operations.
“Look at how many overseas NFL games there are, more [European] football teams are coming over to North America for training camps,” he says.
“There’s a rise in experiential travel. Travelling fans expect more when they’re in the stadium and there’s going to be a lot more of that, particularly in the Americas.
“That brings a lot more of business and sports travel together.”
ATPI’s line of work in sport requires expertise across a range of different areas, whether it be pivoting to find rooms in hotels that are seemingly fully booked – as was the case at Paris 2024 – or selling hospitality packages.
Ultimately, when a sports event concludes, Perrin says that ATPI takes pride in knowing “there’s a little piece of us” in an athlete’s success, whatever that may require.
“We start off sometimes with one area which might not be our core business focus, but we evolve and we’re able to incorporate it,” adds Perrin. “But we will never lose sight of our core competency, which is travel.”
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