Touring specialist Trafalgar is to introduce a “wellbeing director” on each of its tours to ensure guests’ safety in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Speaking on a Travel Weekly webcast, chief executive Gavin Tollman revealed the new position would be additional to the tour director and driver when the operator restarts operations, which he hopes will be in the autumn.
Trafalgar, which is part of The Travel Corporation, the family-owned business which celebrates it centenary this year, has so far cancelled all tours until the end of August.
Tollman said that health and safety would be the priority for all guests in future.
“All of our research; all of our guests we talked to, their number one question to us is about their wellbeing,” he said.
“So we are currently investigating the opportunity to have a third person who goes out of their way to ensure everyone’s bags, when they are brought down, are cleaned when they go, or who is calling ahead to restaurants to make sure we can social distance from others when we going out to eat. We are looking at all different variables.”
Asked if a wellbeing director would be a permanent position, Tollman said: “Certainly permanent in the Covid environment. But I think the one thing we all recognise is what is good today might not be tomorrow.”
Tollman said Trafalgar and the wider TTC group was “going out of our way to define what the future of travel needs to look like on our trips”.
He added: “We need to leverage our knowledge, our expertise and give our guests and our agent partners the confidence that they should travel with us, because we’ve done all the hard work.”
Tollman said this meant a new training programme for travel directors “to really understand what they should be doing in a different way in today’s day and age”, plus working with drivers to set “specific protocols of what they are and how they should be approaching guests”.
He added: “I’m talking about things like when you arrive at hotels, or when you arrive at a site, what we should be doing, how we get on and off the coach. We’ve also set hygiene protocols of cleanliness of coach, how we engage with people, including how many people sit on a coach – this is very much determined by the sites that we are going to, and what the constraints are.
“In Switzerland for example, two weeks ago, we couldn’t assemble more than five people. Now we can have 30 people assembled. These are some of the protocols that we are putting in place.”
Tollman said that as well as making changes and new protocols to his own operations, Trafalgar was also engaging with suppliers and attractions in destinations to ensure guests’ safety on the ground.
“We have defined specific standards and we are having conversations – and I’m literally talking about conversations with the Vatican or the Eiffel Tower, that’s the degree we’re having,” he revealed.
“We have taken the onus on helping define what [the new requirements] look like. We didn’t just say ‘be safe’. That’s where having an individual like a wellbeing director, who understands those protocols, is so important. Because it doesn’t happen organically, it requires conscious thought in order to bring in these changes.”
Tollman added: “If everyone takes this seriously, we can achieve it. And those [attractions] who unfortunately did not want to come on the journey; we told them we wouldn’t come anymore. So we made that shift. We are not going to go to a place where we’re putting anyone at risk.”