Specialists have to deliver quality

Specialists have to deliver quality

FIRST Choice’s Dermot Blastland believes that “general service by mass operators is at least equal to that of specialists” (Travel Weekly March 19).

Get any good specialist’s brochure and telephone them as if you are a client. Ask them searching questions about their product, check out their brochure in detail – and then do the same with a ‘specialist’ mass operator. There is a difference.

Yes, maybe not in the first years that you have taken over a specialist and maybe not in all of your specialist divisions, but later on.

Looking back, mass operators should and can have good specialist divisions, but rarely good specialist operators.

You can quote one or two examples and show I am wrong but the list of specialists that have been ‘integrated’, as opposed to left standing alone, are far greater.

Why not just buy a specialist, integrate it and learn from it – nothing wrong with that if done properly.

It is easy for specialists to denigrate mass operators without good reason, and many do so. Our mass operators provide a good service at a good price, but as a specialist operator we have to be better in our service and presentation.

We do not have economies of scale so how do good specialists survive and prosper in the current economic climate? The only way to be sure of future success is to not only to offer a better service but to deliver it as well.

SImply telling the customer that we are providing them with a ‘quality’ holiday is something that cannot just be read out by our marketing staff; it is something that must be delivered by our operations department.

The difference in service may not be as great as some specialists would have us believe but there has to be a difference.

If there wasn’t we simply could not survive.

Nick Cooper, Villa Plus, St Albans, Hertfordshire