More flights from northern airports, no discounts and a level playing field are on The Holiday Village’s Andrea Smith’s wishlist
I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas, are rested up and looking forward to peaks. Aside from being rushed off your feet in January, what other expectations and hopes do you have for the year to come?
For me, 2025 brings several milestones, including my daughter’s wedding and a 30‑year anniversary for me and my husband. The latter will signal the beginning of 12 months packed full of some of the holidays we have been promising ourselves for years. Life is short and the list long, so I intend to cram in as many as time and money will allow.
More flights
Professionally, as an agent booking mostly long-haul, I hope this year might see an adjustment in the balance of long-haul flying between the airports in the north and south of the country.
In the census of 2021, an estimated 15.5 million people lived in the north of England (listed as encompassing the northeast, northwest and Yorkshire and Humber) and yet, unlike London, we can’t get a direct flight to the Far East, the Indian Ocean, most of Africa and the Caribbean, nor anything that isn’t in the East Coast US time zone.
There’s the odd exception, of course, like the Manchester flights to Shanghai, Houston and Barbados, but surely there is enough potential business for even a weekly service to destinations like Antigua, Nairobi and Mauritius, even if only seasonal? I have no doubt northern agents would fight hard to fill these flights for airlines.
Last year saw the shift towards a more sustainable travel industry gathering pace – led by some of our most forward-thinking sectors – and let us hope this will continue.
Covid may be firmly in our rear-view mirror, but during that difficult time we discovered agent and operator form a symbiotic relationship, shown at its best when we work together. Let’s hope those realisations are remembered and honoured with price parity and balance due dates that are the same regardless of how a client books, meaning agents are not left out in the cold in the price-sensitive market.
Less discounting
I hope in 2025 we can better appreciate our own value. I have a colleague who has a long-running homeworking business and he never discounts. He believes our focus should be on profitability, not heavily discounted trips.
He firmly believes the service he offers is worth paying for, and has built a client bank that agrees with him. For anyone who’s been in the industry long enough and can remember the aggressive cruise discounting of several years ago, it took a long time to sort out that mess, so let’s not go there again.
When agents heavily discount from a tour operator’s price, it devalues our worth and that of the product we are selling. Price parity helps, but wouldn’t it be great to see us believing in ourselves this year and discounting less?
The word ‘hope’ appears many times in this piece, but what is the start of a new year for, if not to focus on better times ahead?
I send you all my very best wishes for a successful peaks and a prosperous 2025.
Operators, Please stop the pinging!
We couldn’t do it without them, so I asked Leah Ormerwood from Travel Village Group HQ what her administration team would love to see in 2025. Top of their list was streamlining of schedule change notifications. I’m told they get countless emails for even the minutest of schedule changes.
Where is the sense in notifying about a five-minute change for a flight that doesn’t depart for another six months? Sometimes multiple changes come in for the same flight on the same day! Of course, notify major changes immediately. But at the ticketing stage, wouldn’t one email confirming final flight times cover minor changes of under an hour? Operators may say it’s just an auto-generated process, but for admin teams it leads to many wasted hours.