Cook groups eye 200 new members
Freedom Travel Group and Co-operative Personal Travel Advisors (CPTA) are targeting up to 40 new members next year – and 200 within five years.
The consortium and homeworking network, both part of Thomas Cook Group, reported a 4% increase in revenue to £250 million for the year to September 30.
Twenty-two homeworkers have joined CPTA in the past year, while Freedom has welcomed 11 new travel agency businesses.
Paul Hemingway, Cook’s financial director for commercial operations, said there was no intention for CPTA to go back to having 400-plus members, as it did when Teletext drove a lot of homeworking business.
But he said both businesses had experienced an “excellent year against a backdrop of market difficulties”. He hopes to attract between 20 to 30 new members to CPTA and up to 12 new travel agencies to Freedom in 2017.
Hemingway told members that average selling prices were up 5%, with cruise sales up 7% and Disneyland Paris sales up 18%.
“There is a return to personal service and contact with the customer,” he said. “There’s a good chunk of consumers who like the personal touch and interaction with homeworkers and agents.
“Yes, there is growth online, but not always to the detriment of agents. It’s never going toreplace the consumers who see booking with an agent face-to-face as the beginning of the holiday experience.”
Commenting on the joint venture between Thomas Cook and The Co-operative Travel at the conference, a week before it was announced the partnership is to end, Hemingway sought to reassure members.
“Whatever the outcome, it doesn’t change anything in these businesses,” Hemingway said.
Freedom and CPTA came under Cook’s control as part of the joint venture, along with 400 Co-operative Travel stores.
Last week, the Co-op exercised a right to sell its 30% stake to Cook for £50 million, giving Cook until 2018 to phase out The Co-operative Travel brand.
As a result, CPTA will also have to drop the Co-op name.
Tanzer defends Abta over ‘lack of support’ criticism’
The chief executive of Abta was forced to defend the association’s role in how it promotes the benefits of booking with travel agents.
Asked what Abta does to help drive consumers into agencies and why it has not run adverts during prime-time television, Mark Tanzer said the association was “always out there” getting the message across through PR, local radio and print adverts.
During a Q&A after a panel debate at the conference, a member of the audience accused Abta of not doing enough to support agents.
Tanzer said: “TV is expensive. But we are always out there throughout the year saying ‘look for the logo’. It’s very much part of our consumer remit to do that. We’ve launched another campaign in January that says ‘look for the brand, look for the logo’. Most members have seen it and we run ads in newspapers and on radio.
“It’s not just in advertising, it’s also in all the PR we do. We have a 24-hour newsdesk that does hundreds of media interviews. When we run the campaigns in local areas you can see the results.
“If we had a £10 million budget we’d do TV advertising, but we don’t, so we have to use PR, which we have a lot of.
”Asked why operators could not be forced to use the Abta logo as well as Atol’s, Tanzer said they were not required to by law.
“We [Abta] don’t have the force of the regulator,” he said. “We are an association of members. You have to get the right balance between coercing members in the interests of everybody and letting people make their own decisions.
“We do encourage people to use the Abta brand. We haven’t yet, and I’m not sure we ever would, say ‘you have to have this on your advertising’. Advertising is expensive. It also takes the message away from their brand.”