Staffing pressures are forcing independent agencies to review their retail networks as they struggle to maintain service levels amid strong booking volumes.
“Desperate” Travel Stop owner Bridget Keevil is considering closing her Buntingford branch in Hertfordshire after recently losing its single member of staff and finding it hard to recruit a suitable replacement.
Unable to spare any of the agency’s six staff in its Suffolk-based shops, in Elmswell, Hadleigh and Claydon, Keevil now drives 90 minutes to Buntingford to open the shop herself one day each week.
Claydon is the only Travel Stop branch that opens six days a week, while Elmswell, Hadleigh and Buntingford open just once a week.
Keevil said: “We can only do this for a certain amount of time before people fall over. It gets on top of you after a while. Our aim is to turn around a quote in 24 hours but we’re lucky if we are doing that in five days. Everybody is picking up four, five, six enquiries on top of that.”
Keevil said she will close the Buntingford branch at Christmas, when a five-year break clause in the lease comes into effect, if she cannot find someone to manage the shop.
“I cannot shift the staff around [to Buntingford] because it’s too far away,” she said. “The shop is a chain around my neck.”
Althams Travel, which has 31 branches, has shut its Littleborough shop in Greater Manchester for a month as it only had three staff, and the manager left due to ill health.
But managing director Sandra McAllister said the shop would reopen in July, following a successful recruitment process.
“I can understand why agencies might have to shut. It’s so busy and you cannot get fully qualified staff at the moment,” she said.
Andrew Earle, head partner at Andrew Earle’s Holidays, has reduced opening hours at his three branches in East Yorkshire and introduced an appointment-only system due to staff shortages. He said staff numbers at his Brough store had dropped from 13 to seven during the pandemic.
While he said each shop was profitable, he added: “If we have another serious dip [in consumer confidence], that could be fairly disastrous for the industry. If we go back into a winter of restrictions then we’ll have to review the business.”