Your letters

It’s a good relationship – don’t let us down now

I WONDERED if Thomas Cook would like to shed any light on their current web pricing? We have had many occasions over the past few weeks when we were unable to get anywhere near the web price for customers bringing in web matches – we’re talking massive differences. Cook has always been one of the best tour

operators for not doing this, and we’ve always been able to match their web prices. If you said First Choice then fine, they do really un- dercut but I’ve never known Thomas Cook to do this. For example today I had a regular client (whose custom I do not wish to lose) with a price for Dominican Republic from the Cook website. The web price was £5,236, our viewdata price for the exact same holiday was

In praise of a trade-only operator...

I was so impressed with Jessica Anderson from the Travel 2 reservations team, I wanted to highlight in TTGthe benefits of working with a trade-only tour operator like Travel 2. Jessica helped me close a sale to a destination I had very little first hand knowledge of, she put the

£6,028. Come on, how does it expect us to compete to such extreme differences as these? I am surely going to lose my regulars – they are not going to pay our price when they can book online at

such a saving and who is to blame them? That’s a £792 difference on a booking on which we’d make approximately £780 in commission! Come on Cook, us agents have been supporting you for years and we want to continue to do so, so why let us down now?

Name and address supplied.

■ Thomas Cook replies:We are fully

committed to our travel agent partners and work hard to ensure they have access to competitively priced holidays.

entire itinerary together for my clients and made me look like the destination expert. It reminded me of the benefits of being able to tap into the expertise and resource of a large tour operator that really supports the trade.

Kathie Ellis

manager, Newell’s Travel

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Is there a conflict of interests for Abta candidate?

So Luke Pollard, Abta’s head of public affairs, is taking off to stand as a Labour candidate (TTGApril 9).

As someone who has worked in Whitehall, I wonder if anyone asked the following questions: in the unlikely event Mr Pollard becomes an MP, how can he represent the interests of all Abta members, rather than just follow the party line? Is Abta happy to have its head of public

affairs off for the duration of the run-up to the election? I have never known a senior member of an

apolitical trade association take time out to fight an election.

Richard Tobias

chairman, Best Loved Hotels

Government is the reason why we need a holiday!

Regarding your story “One week holiday now deemed a ‘luxury’ by government” (ttglive.com), surely everybody needs at least a week’s holiday to get away from the stress of the politicians and bankers stealing all our money!

Barry Coleman

director, Oriental Panorama

WHAT DO YOU THINK? The deadline for letters

ttgletters@ttglive.com

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