Independent agents are resilient and resourceful and will find alternatives, says Resfeber Travel co-director Arron Mitchell
I have been watching the Saga saga (pun fully intended) with great interest over the last few weeks.
It’s always disappointing to see a tour operator that has been so vocal about how important the trade is to their business as recently as October 2021 do a 180° turn and decide to work with a “smaller group” of agents.
While the company won’t confirm who those chosen agents are, it’s clear that it has decided to restrict itself to a major consortia group and select cruise clubs.
My thing with Saga Holidays, as an over-50s specialist, is that they do not capture the breadth and diversity of the older market.
The over-50s market is incredibly active, and Saga has always been a hard sell to someone that hasn’t travelled with them before.
We’ve all had that situation where we’ve offered Saga to a customer aged 50 or over and they’ve looked at you like you have just trodden excrement into their new white carpets.
I had a situation a few years ago where a repeat customer wanted a particular hotel, and I tried every operator going and no one had any availability. As a last resort I checked Saga and they had one room left at the hotel.
I rang the customer excitedly to let her know I had found a room for her. I went through the flight details, room type and everything else, confirmed the price and she asked me to book.
I started to go through the booking spiel and as soon as I said “your holiday is with Saga Holidays…” she replied with, “Arron I would rather stay at home than go on a Saga Holiday”.
And despite my attempts to convert her to the fact she had to have very little to do with Saga, if she wished, as it was a hotel stay she just could not bring herself to book with the brand.
Saga’s recent attempts to appeal to the young at heart over-50s market, with TV adverts and declarations of how important the trade are to their mix, clearly aren’t working. And now the company has had to rethink who it works with.
Working with agents isn’t cheap. I can see how the costs to draw up legal agreements, negotiations on commercial terms, processing of payments, commission, business development teams, fuel, fam trips and everything else can seem eye-watering when some agent partners don’t do a considerable amount of business with the firm.
What does surprise me, however, is that they have decided to only work with that “smaller number” of agents.
Do they really think those customers that booked with the non-chosen agents are going to rush through the doors and book with the selected agents?
No good agent worth their salt is going to lose a customer, especially since we are just recovering from the worst two years of the travel industry’s history.
If you have done a fairly sizeable business with Saga, then speak to your other touring or cruise partners and look for synergies to be able to confidently switch-sell those customers to other operators.
There are some great operators out there that have some great products, like Trafalgar, Newmarket and Riviera – and there are the escorted touring operators like G Adventures, Explore and Intrepid.
Inevitably, you may lose some customers to Saga directly or to the select few agents who are completely brand-loyal to them – but you can save a lot of those customers by understanding the positives of alternative touring and cruise operators, highlighting the benefits of those products and why they are a better option than Saga Holidays.
As for Titan Travel, I can very well understand why some agents have stripped its brochures off their shelves.
But I’ve known the trade team at Titan for more than 10 years and know how hard Edwina works for those agents and how passionate Andy Squirrell is about the company and how important the trade is to its business mix.
However, it’s concerning that Titan and Saga have combined tour operating functions to streamline their costs.
How do we know that Titan won’t take the same stance on trade partners that Saga has in six, 12, 18 months?
Well, the truth is we don’t know whether any of the tour operator partners we work with will make a decision of that nature.
Titan is going to be an easier operator to switch-sell to, as you can say with confidence that “Titan Travel runs the operations for Saga Holidays, so you will have a very similar experience”.
Most Saga customers, if they have travelled over the last four or five years, will know of Titan Travel as they share the same VIP home departure service – so they will have seen the brand at the beginning and end of their journeys.
Independent agents are resilient and resourceful, and I suspect Saga may come to regret this decision in the long-term.
More:Travel agents slam Saga’s move to reduce trade partners