I AM writing in response to the letter from Wardle Travel (TravelWeekly March 13).
Like many companies, our main booking season starts in January and builds up through February and March – during this period, we always increase our staffing levels to meet the rising demand.
This winter, however, Haven Holidays experienced an unprecedented level of calls and as soon as it became apparent that our increased team would need fast, additional support we brought in an experienced external company to act as overflow.
We genuinely believed this was the best way to ensure our agency customers, their customers and those who book direct with us had their requests fulfiled as quickly and efficiently as possible. This is the first time we have ever been forced to take this course of action.
For the most part, this solution proved very successful, but we do acknowledge there were some problems, for which we apologised, and rectified promptly. We are very sorry for any inconvenience this has caused our agency partners and their customers and would like to reassure them that this was a one-off situation and will not happen again.
Last year was a very successful one for Haven and we see no reason that this will not be improved upon again this year.
As a consequence, we are reviewing our call-centre staffing levels to ensure next winter we are fully able to deal with agency and customer requests without needing to resort to outsourcing .
I would like to thank our agency partners for their continued support of Haven.
John Murphy
Managing director
Haven
Hemel Hempstead
Hertfordshire