Major Travel’s managing director is hoping revenue this year will be up to 50% higher than in 2019, with the operator also looking to double its South Africa-based staff.
Qasim Gulamhusein said luxury tailormade trips have been playing a key role in the business’s success.
Last year’s revenues were up by 30% compared with 2019, Gulamhusein said, but this year’s performance has been ever stronger.
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“We should definitely be up 40% on pre-Covid, but if we hit 50% then even better,” said Gulamhusein, who acquired the business in 2017 when it was mainly flight-only.
Now, he said, packages account for 80% of bookings, with around 30%-40% being tailormade. The latter proportion is “increasing pretty much month on month”, he added.
“We’ve done well in terms of accelerating the expansion of destinations and focusing on packages and tailormade,” Gulamhusein said. “That brief that we set ourselves in 2017, even with Covid we’ve achieved that within five or six years.”
The main destinations are the US, the Middle East and the Far East, Gulamhusein said, but safari trips represent a growing part of the business which will be further developed over the coming months.
“We’re going to be really pushing the safari niche, because we’re getting a lot of interest there,” Gulamhusein said.
Other plans include expanding the eight-strong Cape Town team, which was set up last year to complement the efforts of UK staff.
Following positive feedback from agents, Major Travel intends to increase the Cape Town team to 15 or 16 employees. The South Africa staff focus on single-centre packages, alongside some multi-centre, whereas the UK team handles more complex trips, Gulamhusein said.
The company has a 50-strong workforce in total, including staff in the Philippines working on the operator’s live chat service.
Recruiting in the UK has proved to be challenging, but Gulamhusein described it as a priority.
“We have managed to get people to start relatively soon, but it’s not as many as we would have liked,” he said.
“Staff are what makes the company. We’ve been really blessed with having quality, dedicated staff.”