Tui Travel’s record results have been driven by offering high-quality package holidays, leading the company to declare: “The package holiday is alive and well.”
Thomson and First Choice reported record customer-satisfaction scores this year, with more than 93% of customers rating their holidays ‘good’ or ‘excellent’.
Tui Travel UK managing director Dave Burling said: “These figures, combined with our financial figures, demonstrate the quality of our holidays and it is this that is driving the company performance. It all goes back to our differentiated product strategy.”
Almost three million Thomson and First Choice customers booked ‘differentiated’ or exclusive resorts with the group this summer.
Tui Travel reported underlying operating profits of £471 million for the year to September and summer 2011 sales in the UK up 1% year on year despite the poor state of the economy.
Differentiated product comprised 47% of total UK tour-operator sales and a further 19% were exclusive products – making 66% of tour-operator holiday sales in all.
Burling said the proportion of sales for summer 2012 is even higher, with 65% of advance bookings for differentiated product – the Splash World, Sensatori, Holiday Village and Couples hotels and resorts.
He said the company’s strategy goes back more than 20 years. Burling told Travel Weekly: “Thomson Holidays was always about the quality of the hotel and a superior selection of properties. The only company we thought of as a rival was First Choice and its Holiday Villa product and the 2007 merger brought them together.
“The two brands are highly product focused and we have concentrated on and strengthened that. We listen to our customers in developing concepts exclusive to Thomson and First Choice.”
Burling added: “The real success story of 2011 was the Thomson Couples range of contemporary design hotels. We offered 16 in 2011 and they were incredibly successful.”
He said 39% of Couples customers were new to Thomson or First Choice. “It shows new product can attract new customers,” he said.
But he warned: “You can’t do this overnight. Developing concepts may take five years from conception to market and you need very good supplier relations. An awful lot of focus goes into it. But it’s a virtuous circle.”
The company has no plans to launch new products next summer, but will expand its existing concepts with 10 new Couples properties for 2012.