Proactively approaching customers to rebook holidays – and explaining in full where their money is – is resulting in a much better rate of business retention, according to agents.
Speaking on a Travel Weekly webcast, Charles Duncombe, director of homeworking business Holidaysplease, said: “We are finding that when we contact customers, rather than the other way around, you get a better result.
“When you get a phone call from a customer, they usually want a refund. Whereas if you plan ahead and go to them, the more receptive, cooperative and sympathetic the customer is. If you say, ‘look, why don’t we err on the side of caution; why don’t we rebook for another date’, then we find two-thirds to three-quarters of customers go with that.”
He added that being totally transparent about where their money is also helps.
“If you explain it, warts and all, and explain their money hasn’t just been spent on Porsches and Ferraris and stuff, but that it has actually gone through the supply chain out to hotels and airlines and is going back through operators, we actually find nine times out of 10 customers are very understanding.
“Where they can sometimes get a bit agitated is when you don’t give them any answers. And sometimes, you don’t know.”
He said this had been particularly bad in the first few weeks of lockdown as “operators were scrambling around for a policy and changing it every few days”.
Duncombe described it as like “The Wild West” but said things had settled down in recent weeks, allowing agents to give customers information “with more certainty”.
But Nick Marks, joint managing director at south-east based high street retailer Baldwins Travel, said it was still hard to keep up with all the different policies.
“Every supplier has got their own, different policies going out there. It’s very hard to keep up with what they’re doing.”
And he cited one operator which was originally offering refunds, only to change its policy two weeks later, resulting in a difficult conversation for the Baldwin’s agent to have with their customer.
But Marks said, by and large, his business was coping well. “A lot of our clients are retired and so some of them don’t want to book next year because they don’t know what’s going to happen,” he said. “But the fact that 70%-75% of bookings have been transferred into later on this year or into next year is great news.”
And he said the situation could even lead to a bumper 2021: “With a lot of those holidays already having been paid for – and that money deferred into next year, I’m hoping that people might actually say, well, I’ve got the extra funds to book another one. So you might get a double impact for next year. That’s a fingers-crossed scenario, but there are positives that will all hopefully be able to see in the future.”
Duncombe added: “A lot of the pain that we had to begin with is actually starting to dissipate and some of the clouds we feel are sort of starting to clear a bit. It’s obviously not plain-sailing, but we think by being proactive and grabbing the bull by the horns, you generally get a better result. Customers aren’t quite as vociferous as perhaps they were in the in the early days.”
