Blue Bay Travel has ramped up its relationship with Midcounties Co-opertive Travel with a view to the retailer representing a third of its volumes.
Alistair Rowland, chief executive of the online travel agent and operator, revealed he had strengthened Blue Bay’s partnership with Midcounties Co-op in the three months that he had been at the helm.
Speaking on a Travel Weekly webcast, he said Blue Bay had been selling its products as a supplier to Midcounties for about five years, but volumes had not previously been significant.
“It was a big education piece. If you’re a consortium member with a specialism, you can sell within the Atol group. So you can sell, if Co-op want you to, effectively as an internal supplier – that’s governed and allowed,” he said.
But Rowland, who was previously the head of specialist retail at Midcounties, including travel, added: “It’s never really created a huge amount of traction. So what we’ve done over the last three months is created that traction.
“On our private Facebook group, we have 860 agents, who effectively are members of that group, and it’s a closed group, so all our communications, all of our social assets, all of our offers, are pushed out through that, and a number of practical things as well.
“If we’ve got a new deal with a hotel, actually we give it to Co-op before we even give it to ourselves. So Co-op get a first-mover advantage on our contracts before we even send those deals to our own customer base.”
Rowland said the results were striking.
“Over the last three months, we’ve gained significant traction. We’ve been one of the largest suppliers to Co-op Travel in its widest form, for the last three months, so very significant indeed, against a notional number of sales beforehand.
“So it’s become a great route; good for us, good for them; exclusive products, all the marketing done, so they can push the offers straight out through the social channels. And it means that in database terms, it probably gets out to a database maybe 10 times our size, because it’s going out to the database of all the membership of the travel agents.”
Rowland said the deal would not be replicated for other retailers, but that others would be offered access to accommodation-only product.
“We can’t sell packages outside of the Atol group – and I don’t really think I’d want to either to be honest, because what we’ve got within the group is actually very powerful,” he said.
“But what we will be able to do, and part of our plan going forward, is to promote our product on an accommodation-only basis.
“We have our own Abta number to do that. But it won’t be repackaged in the way the consumer likes it; it will just be the contract. So it will likely create less traction, but it is a way to get the product to a wider source.”
He added: “For now, the Co-op relationship is very powerful. In the end, I think in our growth plans, we want that to be a third of our overall volume.”