Tui’s UK boss has revealed plans to open ten to 20 new stores nationwide in the next 12 months following the resurgence of the high street post-Covid.
The growth plan for more bricks and mortar agencies is possible now Tui’s retail estate is in a “stable” position, said managing director Andrew Flintham, referencing the impact of staff resourcing issues in the sector as a result of the pandemic.
The company currently has 317 branches, including 13 in Next stores.
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Speaking to Travel Weekly, Flintham said the company had set its sights on opening between ten and 20 news stores, including new branches and concessions in Next.
The company will look for premises in areas that do not currently have Tui stores as well as seeking out better locations in existing towns and cities in its portfolio.
He said: “The retail estate is stable and now we’re looking at growing the retail estate. We’re looking for those ‘white spots’. It’s very site dependent: it will depend on finding the right locations for those stores.”
Branch locations were most likely to be in “key retail estates” and could take longer than a year to find. He added: “The higher end probably will take us longer than 12 months because the good locations don’t come up without paying the kind of retail rents that caused the problems in retail in the first place to a degree.”
Flintham said there was potential for its partnership with clothing retailer Next to be developed in the near future although there were no definite plans in the pipeline.
He said: “The collaboration with Next is really successful. Some of the Next stores worked quite well in terms of allowing us to remix into better locations so we’ll set an aspiration to fill in some of those dots, of somewhere between 10 and 20 [stores] but how fast we get there will clearly depend on the opportunities that come up and what we can make work.”
Flintham also stressed the importance of the company’s network of 200 homeworkers, put in place at the start of the pandemic, adding the model was “really working well” for the company.
Praising the staff as a “remarkable bunch”, he said: “Homeworking has been a great success. Those people are just geniuses at managing our customers and have got to be the most enthusiastic people in our business.”
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