Holidaysplease believes it will have restored its pre-pandemic financial position by the end of the year, provided summer departures go ahead as planned.
Speaking on a Travel Weekly webcast, director Charles Duncombe credited the homeworking company’s proactive approach during Covid for its current healthy position.
The company now expects to return to “sustainable, steady growth” of 15% to 20% a year.
“If those [2022] departures happen over the next few months, by the end of this calendar year we will probably be back in the position we were in financially going into Covid,” he said.
At the start of the pandemic, the company told its homeworkers to call all customers to see if they wanted to amend their holiday, even if they weren’t due to depart imminently.
Duncombe said the strategy aimed to “control the uncontrollable”.
“Instead of going into that hunker down mentality, we tried to be as proactive as possible,” he said.
“We basically spent the whole of that April ringing up customers.
“We got a positive result because a lot of customers then felt quite reassured and weren’t panicked.”
The strategy resulted in a holiday cancellation rate of around 10% to 15%, with the vast majority of clients keeping their bookings.
At the start of the pandemic, the company kept all staff working and did not make any redundancies at any stage during Covid.
The move paid off, said Duncombe, adding: “It meant we had got a lot of our admin out of the way and we actually started selling again.
“From April until August 2020, we managed to get to within about 5% down on 2019 sales – right in the eye of the storm.”
The company also ploughed savings into the business, built up over the past decade, with the backing of its bank. This included investment in marketing throughout Covid.
“I just thought, what I want at the end of Covid is to come out of it like a cork out of a champagne bottle, with all my staff intact and all my goodwill intact, and to take advantage of that boom,” said Duncombe.