Last February when British Airways was about to launch the dreaded son of the Performance Reward Scheme, the business travel members of Advantage Travel Centres were at a meeting in London.
Just as the meeting was coming to a close, one of our members stood up and suggested we pool our resources to help combat the growing number of commission cuts from airlines.
I nearly fell off my chair. It is great to think that we have now got to the position where members are thinking in this way.
We debated the merits of members pooling commercial terms and resources and the meeting came to the conclusion that a stronger and more unified organisation would be better equipped to maximise members’ profitability.
After a period of consultation we came up with the Focus 2000 strategy to form a separate consortium within the group to give agents increased buying power.
We already have commercial deals in place with carriers including United Airlines, SAS, Lufthansa and KLM, but the new group will negotiate better terms on existing deals and create links with new suppliers.
Focus 2000 is about long-term, sustainable airline commercial and marketing agreements.
Long-term partnerships that enable our collective voice to be listened to. Gaining the respect of the airlines is one of our most difficult tasks. To do this we need to be in control of our distribution.
We need to demonstrate to strong members that by sharing their commercial terms they will become even stronger. We will need to put pressure on under-performers not to let the team down.
We will also need to create an awareness among our members that directional selling is not against their clients’ interests. We need to find a simpler way of communicating performance figures.
To achieve all this, members in the new grouping will have to meet certain criteria such as having a global distribution system and an IATAlicence.
This means it will not suit all our members.
But for those with turnover of around £2m-£4m I think they have nothing to lose. For those with turnover of £20m-£30m the new venture probably won’t appeal.
Around 78 members out of a possible 220 have decided to join the new consortium.
Focus 2000 is our vision of the future.
It will be a commercially strong group. A group of business travel agents working towards achieving common aims and objectives.
Norman Gage is business travel development manager at Advantage Travel Centre