Travel Operators suffering
By Darren Cronian on Saturday, August 12th, 2006

Every Saturday morning, I wake up early, and take a visit to my local newsagent, buy a selection of newspapers, a pint of milk, and then head back off home, put on a big pot of coffee, and sit down and read through the newspapers.

Travel Operators suffering

Today’s newspapers were full of travel news but what caught my eye were the reports that high street travel operators are having difficulties selling holidays, and rumours are circulating that Thomas Cook have over 300,000 holidays left to sell.

Part of the problem for the large operators, is that people are choosing low cost flights, and then booking accommodation through independent travel agents or the hotel, and villa owners. An added problem has been the very warm weather, and the football World Cup in Germany, both having a major impact.

What I have been impressed with, since writing this blog, is that smaller independent travel agents have started to embrace the Internet, and this has seen them grow, compared to travel operators who have struggled.

I’ve recently noticed the increase in travel companies using television as an advertising medium; where in previous years the majority of TV advertising coverage takes place during January and February, we are still seeing advertisements in July and August, which I think shows that travel operators are struggling to sell holidays.

Traditionally, holidays have been expensive during the Summer holidays, but I think for the first time, we are going to see some great travel deals during the coming months, which can only be great news for travellers, but bad news for the profit levels and shares for travel operators.


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One Response to “Travel Operators suffering”

Colin Maddocks | 24 August, 2006 at 6:06 pm

We are (hopefully), one of the small independent travel agents that have embraced the web as you mention above.

We originally had 3 high street, “bricks and mortar” travel agencies but luckily sold them off to Going Places. About 8 years ago we went “web-only” and, to date, havent’ looked back.

By obtaining our business via the web we have extended our market from strictly “passing trade”, to now having a solid “client bank” from one end of the UK to the other, plus clients from all over the world.

We have seen some great changes within these last 8 years with Tour Operators now trying to sell direct from their websites, but I think by trying to offer knowledge and good service from our “niche” sites we have been able to match them.

With the development of “dynamic packaging”, we can now often beat the tour operators by buying accommodation, transfers and flights as three seperate components ourselves and “packaging” them up using our ATOL licence. Often we are much cheaper than the equivalent “tour operator package” and the client gets exactly what they want. In essence we have become our wown tour operator.

We have a number of “niche” sites, nilecruises4u.co.uk, goaholidays4u.co.uk, egyptholidays4u.co.uk, caribbeanholidays4u.co.uk as well as a generic site,holidayoffers4u.co.uk. We are adding “niche” sites as we identify them as well as having our blog, virtualtravelcast.com.

I think there is still a great deal of exciting development ahead of us in the travel industry and I cant’ wait to see what’s on the way.

Colin

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