Riviera Travel expects to hire more on-the-road trade sales team members and administrative staff to support them over the next 12 months.
The river cruise and escorted touring specialist increased its trade sales team to eight in August but a recent surge in new agent partners has prompted channel director Stuart Milan to consider hiring more faces.
Around 95% of the 58 agents who have started engaging with the operator in the past four weeks have already made a booking.
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Milan said “one of the biggest challenges” his team faced was training new agents who had not worked in the travel industry before.
Although Milan refused to confirm exactly how many people Riviera planned to hire, team expansion “definitely helped” staff deal with trade enquiries, he said.
“Our ambitions are huge for the trade,” he said. “I would like to expand our trade sales team probably in the next six to 12 months.
“In the short term, we’re doing fam trips and making sure we’ve got the right technology for the team to make our store visits as effective as possible but in the long term we will have more feet on the ground.”
Asked what kind of roles he was looking for, Milan (pictured) said he was generally aiming to hire “frontline staff” who were on the road.
“If we see the need for additional admin [staff] then that’s who we’ll hire,” he added. “How many admin staff we hire is based on the number of sales and the agents we’re working with.
“We’re trying to grow our distribution through agents as much as possible.”
He explained that frontline on-the-road staff were tasked with trying to increase Riviera’s exposure with agents.
Milan said he was not overly concerned by the reduced number of agents in the wake of the pandemic. “The agent landscape has shrunk but that is among the smaller [agencies],” he said.
“We have to react to that and be with our key agents much more and watch for the emerging agents coming up. There are new agents springing up all the time.”
Milan said the “instant payback” from this year’s fam trips from agents meant he was planning more educationals next year.
“It just proves if you get people on our product and they understand that ‘price versus value’ proposition that we have, it does turn in instant results, so we’re going to do more fam trips in spring, early summer next year.”
He added there would be around five cruise trip fams in the first half of the year and then Riviera would decide how many to do in the second six months of 2023.
Milan hinted Riviera could offer some fam trips in second half showcasing its touring product.
On Riviera’s Peaks season plans, he said: “We’ve got to be flexible in terms of prepare for a very promising Peaks period but if does not quite come off we’re not putting all our eggs in one basket.
“I am positive with my outlook, but I am not going to say that it’s going to be the biggest ever [Peaks campaign]. There are still a few uncertainties.”
Riviera will “monitor” the ongoing headwinds that face the industry as it plans its Peaks campaign, Milan added.
He said Riviera’s Peaks campaign would include booking incentives for frontline agents. “We want to rewards the frontline agents,” Milan said.
In terms of consumer deals, Milan explained how Riviera wanted to return to a point where it was trading “on the value and quality of product rather than potential gimmicks to get people over the line”.
“The challenge for us is making sure people see that we’re great value for the price point,” he said.
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