Leading travel agency bosses admit they have permanently cut ties with some suppliers as a result of the way they handled the travel crisis during the Covid pandemic.
Hays Travel owner Irene Hays said there was one supplier the group would never work with again “in the whole of mankind” while Travel Counsellors chief executive Steve Byrne said it had “no tolerance” for suppliers which did not put customers first.
Speaking at the Travel Weekly Future of Travel Conference, Hays said: “A number of our supplier partners were in a mess and so were we. There are some frustrations but our supplier partners have been nothing short of fantastic.”
She would not name any specific suppliers but admitted: “There is one supplier that we will never work with in the whole of mankind.”
Byrne told delegates at Google’s London headquarters that Travel Counsellers wanted to work with suppliers with a similar approach to customers.
He said: “I am not going to publicly name any business; people had to make their own decisions [during Covid]. We have to stand up to what we believe in. We believe in doing right by the customer so we have no tolerance for people who are not with us on that journey.”
He said operators which did not have the same criteria would not be put back on Travel Counsellors’ supplier list.
“We will not be putting these businesses back on sale even if there might be demand, if we don’t believe this is in the best interests of the customer,” he said.
Byrne said current sales were split between holidays put together by Travel Counsellors using the company’s own contracted products and third-party suppliers.
He added there was “no doubt” there was demand post-Covid for third-party suppliers which looked after customers under the security of their Atol licence. “There is demand for third-party product as well as our internal product,” he said, but stressed: “That is all secondary to doing what is right for the customer.”
Around two-thirds of Travel Counsellors sales come from repeat customers, he added.
