Agents are becoming “battle-weary” in their fight against the impact of the Covid-19 crisis, according to the boss of Gold Medal.
Lisa McAuley, managing director of B2B tour operations for dnata Travel Europe said she had detected a mood-change in the trade in recent weeks.
“We send a weekly round-up every Friday and we’ve still been putting offers out on social media. They were getting really, really good engagement but that’s watered down over the last couple of weeks. And I think that’s just as agents have become battle-weary if I’m really honest,” she said.
She added that calls into the Gold Medal call centre had also dropped off following the prime minister’s latest address to the nation.
“A good barometer for me is the call volume that comes into the contact centre. And when Boris made an appearance on the Tuesday and spoke about the new restrictions potentially being in place for six months, from that day and the following day and onwards – call volume just went,” she revealed.
“I think that’s people are just taking a step back and just really trying to get their heads around how they’re going to manage their business going forward,” McAuley said.
She explained the operator had reined in the number of offers sent to agents.
“We’ve got to be realistic. We can pump as many offers as we want into the market but if the demand’s not there, the demand is not there. So we’ve almost taken a consultative approach and we are try to have a nuanced conversation with individuals, rather than a blanket approach to everybody,” she said.
“We’ve been accused in the past as having been too big. We were never too big to care, but I get where people were coming from because it did impact our ability to pivot and be agile, and on our speed to market.
“We don’t have that problem now. So we’ve got time to talk to people on an individual basis about what they need. And I would say the vast majority of conversations that certainly I’m involved in, and the feedback that I’m getting from Nick [Hughes, sales director], is that people are thinking that they will come out of this the other side.
“But I also completely understand when people are having a really bad Thursday, or a really bad Tuesday, because something’s happened to them. And that’s just how we have to roll with it right now. There’s no magic bullet in any of this.”
