Tui Travel’s gay holidays brand Freedom is to focus on promoting its programme to lesbians next year.
Innovations manager Paul Clark said the product was biased towards men but where they had women-only hotels, they had proved to be very popular.
Tui spent a few years researching the gay market before launching the brand in January, Clark said.
“There were basic questions we needed to answer because we didn’t know much about the market. Would the gay suppliers react well to being approached by us, should our buyers be gay, how do we market to the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community?
“We found all this out and more, so when we launched, the response was incredibly positive.”
The operator is looking to put more gay-only properties into its portfolio and is pushing the brand aggressively.
Clark added: “We have spent more nights in gay clubs and had more late nights than I care to mention.
“We are promoting Freedom through magazines such as Gaydar, Attitude and Boys, and when we started a Facebook page, we had 2,000 people join overnight.”
Freedom is also planning to focus on gay customer service training to gain Gay Comfort accreditation.