Booking habits changed during the pandemic and agencies must improve their technology to maintain sales volumes, according World Travel Holdings’ (WTH UK) managing director.
Alison Earnshaw told a Travel Weekly webcast WTH UK – the holding company for Cruise118, SixStarCruises and RiverVoyages.com – has seen an increase in customers booking online as the pandemic restricted in-person sales and gave them more confidence to book without using an agent.
“Customers used to be more cautious about parting with huge amounts of money online without speaking to a person, but I think the pandemic changed all our booking patterns as we had to transact online because you couldn’t go down to the shops and do as much in person,” she said.
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“The customer has become more confident transacting online and it wouldn’t be unusual for us to do £3,000-£4,000 bookings online – we’ve done some in excess of that, but the vast majority still come through our agents.”
Earnshaw said WTH UK is investing in its technology so it can improve the service it offers customers and give the company a larger share of the cruise market.
WTH UK implemented a new telephony system in 2022, she said, and it now plans to update several of its other systems to support both staff and customers.
“The whole focus of [the update] is to improve the service that we’re able to give to our customers, to provide increased segmentation which we can personalise better, to give the customer better data and information in every way we communicate with them, and to be more efficient,” said Earnshaw.
“If we can make [our employees’] jobs easier and more straightforward then that makes for a happy workforce and a happy workforce makes for a happy customer.”
She added: “The industry is growing and we want a bigger share of that and we will invest in technology and people to enable us to do that.”
When asked if WTH or any of its brands would consider an acquisition, Earnshaw said that while there are no current plans in place, the possibility is “not off the table”.
“I think if there was a great opportunity, an acquisition wouldn’t be off the table, but there’s lots of opportunity for us to grow organically,” she said.
“We have a great relationship with our parent company and absolute mutual sharing of ideas. We recognise that while WTH is the largest retailer of cruise in the world, the American customer and the way the American customer transacts is not necessarily the same as it is in the UK.
“We do have autonomy to do things our own way because that’s right for the UK customer so that dynamic works really well as we can make our own decisions.”
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