NEWS YOU CAN USE — OPERATORS NEWS
OPERATOR NEWS YOU CAN USE
Carrier boosts trade service with raft of improvements Lucy Huxley
Carrier Travel has made significant changes to its trade website and documentation, and created a social media presence, to improve its service to agents. The Inspirations section of the luxury operator’s site can now be white-labelled, so agents can include it on their own sites. Carrier’s top agents will also
be given access to a password- protected area of the site, where they can access staff who may have been to a hotel they are considering booking for a customer. The agent will get direct contact details for any relevant member of staff, plus access to personal reviews, first-person blogs and images to help them close a sale. An educational calendar in the password-protected area of the site features details of incentives and promotions that agents need to support to earn places on fam trips. Managing director
Steve Kimber (right) said more videos were being added to the site.
Agent bookings fuel 11% increase in luxury operator’s 2015 sales
Bookings at Carrier for 2015 are 11% up on last year, with trade bookings 15% ahead. Sales for 2016 are 55% up on
last year, although on smaller numbers.
Carrier features Sugar Beach, Saint Lucia
“We have quite a lot of videos of our top 100 hotels in long-haul destinations, so we are now doing the same for short-haul,” he said. He said he had also spent £40,000-£50,000 with Dolphin Dynamics revamping Carrier’s documentation. Agents can now create bespoke documentation with hotel and destination images, and their own contact details and logo, rather than those of Carrier. “We believe this is unique in our market sector,” added Kimber. “We are trialling it with a number of agents and it’s going down well.”
Carrier is also going live on
Twitter, Facebook and Instagram for the first time this month, to improve communication and the dissemination of information, and to enable staff to share images and comments from trips. “We are setting up a dedicated
group on LinkedIn for our preferred partners that will be by invitation-only so we can have a private space for them to share trends and market information, to help them sell,” said Kimber. “Every week, 10 to 12 suppliers visit us. Now we’ll have an outlet to share what those suppliers tell us, so it will also be a way of educating and training agents.”
carrier.co.uk
Managing director Steve Kimber said the US, Canada and Mexico were selling particularly well, with bookings having risen 31% this year and 161% for 2016. “We are on course for our best-
ever year in this region,” he added. “We have doubled year-on-year sales at more than 30 hotels.” Kimber claimed the
appointment of business development manager Raj Mistry last year, who had signed up several agent partners, had been pivotal to the growth. Carrier’s new system, enabling it to turn quotes around more quickly, had also been instrumental. Carrier’s biggest opportunity
was with complex multi-centre itineraries, he added.
18 •
travelweekly.co.uk — 25 June 2015
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