CONFERENCE REPORT NEWS
Hays Travel IG Conference 2016: Group says stores benefit from being stronger online. Lee Hayhurst reports from forum held on Royal’s Independence of the Seas
More from Hays, page 18
Delegates at the gala awards night
Hays says a better website boosts visits to its stores
Hays Travel says it has growing evidence the more it invests in building a better website the more its high street stores benefit.
Speaking to Travel Weekly at last
week’s Hays Independence Group conference, John Hays, the group’s managing director, said agents no longer see the web as their enemy. He said the group is seeing
increasing use of the ‘branch locator’ facility on its website, and estimates that about 80% of people using it are new customers. “The better we are doing in the
digital world, the more people come into branches,” Hays said. “We are seeing that without any
doubt. It’s quantifiable.” As well as improved websites, social media has also been seen to benefit stores, as well as the group’s homeworkers and call centres. The firm is planning to launch
an ‘engagement index’ for its stores to show the link between digital activity and in-store sales. Hays has increased its multimillion-pound marketing budget for 2017 but halved the
Hays Travel in numbers
140 Hays Travel shops 232 IG branches 159 homeworkers
amount it spends on traditional newspapers as it switches focus to channels like social media. Hays said this approach fits in
with its strategy of personalisation and all branch managers are encouraged to use social media to project an authentic voice. The conference heard the IG
division, whose members operate 232 branches, was benefiting from being independent and flexible, and using technology to provide customers with a personal service. Hays said more members are becoming niche players with specialisms in certain destinations or holiday types, exploiting demand for something tailor-made. “We can control quality, choice
of airline and yet still give people a full Atol,” he said. “It’s that type of business we are seeing growing and flourishing, where we have a differentiated product.”
CRM: Better system ‘will help close sales’
Hays Travel agents and Independence Group members will be offered increasingly powerful customer relationship management (CRM) technology to help them know their customers better. John Hays said the firm has six developers working full-time on
the group’s databases to hone the system. “Knowing and understanding our customers is a major point of
differentiation for us,” he said. “We have always had what we believe to be a really good CRM system. Not everyone chooses to use it but having a single customer view really helps to close that sale.”
John Hays
All-inclusive: Hays tips growth in a challenging market
Growing all-inclusive sales will help Hays Travel Independence Group members maintain their margins as prices rise due to the slump in the value of the pound. Managing director John
Hays warned delegates that holiday costs were likely to rise by around 18% next year and that this, aligned to a likely increase in inflation, would eat into people’s real incomes and “make Britain poorer”. But he added: “We have seen
a trend for several years of a growth in all-inclusive [and this has continued] since June 23 [the EU referendum].” Hays described the economic outlook as “challenging” but said he was optimistic.
3 November 2016
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