IS IT just me or is everyone as fed up as I am that the front pages of Travel Weekly seem to be dominated with tour operators?
There are travel agents out here and I can assure you that our priorities right now are not who has been taken over this week or who has moved where or which directors have cleaned up with several million for doing what appears to be not a lot.
At last week’s ARTACWorldchoice conference, the biggest challenge was trying to find out the real truth about how bookings were going this year.
The general consensus of opinion from the agents was that the travel press would serve us better if it kept us updated with weekly booking trends.
Which destinations are selling well to help us direct our windows and advertising? Are sales up or down?Where are the bookings going to?Who is getting more than their share and who is hurting?
I know it’s only cold comfort but it is a relief if you’re down, and in retail we are down 5%, to find many others in a similar position and that you are not totally out of step with the rest of the trade.
I felt a guilty relief to find many agents were in fact a lot worse off than I was, some over 25% down.
In bar-room talks, the multiples were blamed for everything, but that’s nothing new, along with the hypermarkets. Apparently the free insurance offer is much more effective than previous campaigns.
This is the trick – overprice your insurance to ú50 each for a fortnight to Spain with no children’s discounts.You can then offer a ú200 saving to a family of four. That, with the operator’s brochured discount of say ú100 and they can save ú300 on a ú500 holiday and it has only cost you ú30 for a net family premium.
As Frank Carson nearly says “It’s the way you sell them.”
The plethora of new out-of-town retail shopping parks seems more to blame for diverting people out of traditional shopping areas.
Each new retail park boasts either a hypermarket or a couple of large multiples. That’s where the bookings are going.
Not that they’re making money out of it, because at those rents they need real volumes which simply aren’t around.
No, the market is flat, the cake is not growing and there are more agents taking a share. So the slices get smaller for everyone and who knows what will happen if First Choice do open another 700 new shops.
With all this going on I really hope the operators will delay the launch of summer 2000.
This will be a damp squib affair and will only serve to confuse an already unsteady market.