Hiring the Redknapps to endorse your travel agency is a promotional tool only mammoth companies such as Thomas Cook can deploy.
So how can independent agencies compete with Jamie and Louise, who, however irritating they are, have boosted Thomas Cook’s revenues?
Go niche
Gary Wardrope, owner and managing director of Get Cruising, believes you shouldn’t even try: “Taking on Thomas Cook and Thompson wasn’t an option, so I don’t even bother with the Canaries, I don’t bother with Spain,” he says. By offering different travel experiences to these travel goliaths – Wardrope for example opted to specialise in cruises – you can still prosper.
Experience in your chosen niche helps enormously. Wardrope and his staff are particularly well placed to understand their customers’ needs as they tend to be the same age as them. “I’ve got a team of four people and we’re all aged 50 plus. We’ve been in the game 30 years and been around the world, so we can talk from our own knowledge.”
50 is the new 30, someone in their 70s is 50 in terms of their attitude and the way they act. I recognised this change in society, and I don’t think there’s an agency out there focused on this market
Gary Wardrope, MD of Get Cruising
Wardrope says he targeted the 50-plus market because “that’s where the money is. Normally at this age people have paid off their mortgages and their children are grown up; they have a bit of extra money in the bank.
“Today’s 50 is the new 30, someone who’s in their 70s is 50 in terms of their attitude and the way they act. I recognised this change in society, and I don’t think there’s an agency out there focused on this market.”
Christopher Hill is CEO of Hands Up Holidays, which targets young professionals aged between 27 and 38. He believes a strong online presence is vital to winning custom in this demographic segment.
“Because we were targeting young professionals, who tend to be rather web-savvy, we knew the internet was very important,” he explains. “We focused and invested a lot into getting key words right for Google searches.”
Setting up in a niche area does mean, of course, you’re ignoring huge swathes of potential custom. Karen Cioma-Park, joint director of Chester Travel Connection, takes an entirely different tack to Wardrope. “Being a new business, we’re not going to concentrate on any specific sector,” she says. “We’re happy to deal with anything from short city breaks right up to world cruises.”
A ‘jack of all trades’, Chester Travel Connection isn’t necessarily master of none. “We’ve been awarded the Ambassador Status of accredited cruise experts, and we’re the only people in Chester West that have that. It puts us a bit above other agencies in the area.”
Original Travel focuses on “the original big short break”, explains founder Nick Newbury, and this includes city breaks and ski weekends. Since starting the business in 2003, the business has diversified according to its customers’ needs. “People have come back to us for a lot more than just short breaks, but the real common theme of all the holidays we sell is the original angle.”
Travelling experience
Experience in the industry is useful but not essential, according to Christopher Hill, an ex-corporate financier. And Hill can help assuage any guilt you might feel about avoiding work for a year by travelling round the world, because doing so himself later served him well in his chosen field.
“My business puts together tours that combine sightseeing with volunteering,” he says. “It really just burst out of my own experiences: I haven’t come from a travel industry background, but I was fortunate enough to do quite a lot of travelling.”
James Jayasundera, whose Ampersand Travel agency operates at the luxury end of the market, has travelled his whole life. “My father’s Sri Lankan so we’d go there every summer,” he explains.
“We’d stop in Karachi, Delhi, Bombay and Madras and return back via Bangkok. By the time I was 12 I would know every single hotel in each city, and which ones are good, which are unreliable, etc.”
Working in the travel industry, he says, “is something I think I was born to do.”
Jayasundera, who previously studied hotel and catering management and worked in the Savoy and Hilton, decided to change tack. After a brief stint in banking he joined a travel company, where he prospered – but his friends thought he could do even better.
“I just realised I was bringing a lot of my own business in through personal contacts and connections. My friends in the banking industry told me I should set up my own company, but I said I didn’t want the responsibility.
“But one of my friends said he’d set me a company up as a Christmas present, so I agreed and we set one up. However, within a few months I handed in my resignation and started my own company – which in three months was bigger than the old company!”
