Start-up Cyprus operator Biblio Travel is planning a megafam for “at least 160 agents” later this year, as it revealed over 2,000 agents had already signed up to work with it.
Agents will be flown to the island from all three of Biblio’s departure airports – Gatwick, Manchester and Birmingham – and managing director Clare Tobin promised participants would have the chance to see many different parts of the destination.
“I think we’re all ready to have a bit of fun,” she said. “Cyprus is really ready to welcome us.”
Tobin said the megafam had been planned for “every week this summer” but had been pushed back repeatedly due to the pandemic and on-going restrictions.
But she urged agents to register their interest in joining the trip on the operator’s website, bibliotravel.co.uk, with no booking required.
Tobin said: “We’ve been working with the consortia, then moving into the multiples, and obviously, the independents. We’re continuously signing up and working with people to get them on board at the moment.
“The sales managers are really focusing on their regions. So we’ve moved quite quickly, and since we launched a week ago, we’ve been getting considerable hits on to the website, which is very much an agent web platform.
“They’ll see from the design is not aimed at direct business, but has been built for agents, to give them all the information and room types, and all of the stuff that they really need to be able to make bookings and have choice in front of their customers.”
Tobin said Biblio had been holding weekly webinars and that the team were about to head out every Tuesday and Thursday to meet partners in person.
She said Cyprus as a destination had always been “very pro UK agents” and added: “I think we’ve got probably one of the best network of agents across the world and we saw on National Travel Agent Day last week what great support that they had. They’ve had a really tough year.”
She added: “We know that agents understand Cyprus as well as a country, and from the feedback we’ve had, they’ve been looking for another operator to support them in the supply and demand of holidays there. We did some agent surveys to understand what they would like to see and we’ve tried to match that.
“For us, we have got a great network of agents across the country and we feel that we can work with them to be able to fill that capacity gap. And we’ve been working very strongly commercially, to make sure that we are getting the right offers in the right prices, and the right product for each those each of our different customer types.
“We’re going to work with everybody as we haven’t got our own agencies, so therefore we can work across the landscape.”
Tobin also insisted agents could rely on Biblio Travel.
“We’ve got great backing, and it’s going to be a company that will be here for the future, so we’re looking forward to supporting them,” she said.