Blue Bay Travel plans to double the number of people it employs to 200 and has already started recruiting to increase its workforce.
Alistair Rowland, the recently-appointed chief executive of the online travel agent and long-haul tour operator, said the company had furloughed some employees during the first lockdown, but had since brought everyone back, made zero redundancies and had even used overtime in November.
“November was the fourth-biggest month in Blue Bay’s 20-year history which shows the kind of volumes that got transacted,” he said.
“It’s flattened in December but we are cautiously growing and so what we’re finding now is that we’re recruiting.”
Rowland said he was recruiting in sales, for his new homeworker model and for his customer support and development functions.
“We have all this stuff booked that’s going to go in the future and we need to service it as well as we’re selling it,” he said.
“The core number is about 100 heads here and within the first two years of our plan, we plan to double that number and we’ve got the office space to be able to do that.”
He said having more people in his customer service team was essential following the pandemic, with people booking much further into the future than usual.
“You’ve got to be cautious and careful about hedging strategies. You’ve got to be always available on booking out-of-date-range flying and the strategies around out-of-date-range flying,” he explained.
“We’ve got an amendment rate that runs generally at about 15% perhaps, and I think it will probably be double that in 2021 and 22 – probably some of that forced and some of that because consumers will change their mind.”
He added: “When people are paying an average of £2,000 a head, they want to be serviced well, and we, like everybody else, couldn’t achieve that through handling 10,000 cancellations and amendments and such like.
“It’s all very well pushing it into the top of the funnel and selling a load of stuff but actually, you’ve got to be able to service it well. So I’m really focusing on making sure the back-of-house service is as good as we are selling it at the front.”
Rowland said this requirement would only increase further as the business grows, adding: “In lots of areas, Blue Bay is fundamentally an online travel business that transacts online but it also transacts now as a significant B2B tour operator to the Co-op family and that’s becoming very powerful.
“If we become an accommodation-only supplier as well, that will need servicing – we will need to do credit control on agents and those kinds of things.
“Plus, we’re building up a homeworker business, as many large businesses have, and they’ll be able to service their own clients in their own way, selling whatever they want. Those agents can [also] fulfil leads that come through our key website, so that will be that will take some administering as well.”