VOICE OF LUXURY
VOICE LUXURY Ů Lisa Fitzell managing director,
Elegant Resorts and If Only The tour operator boss discusses growth
across both brands and how they are boosting support for the trade. Hollie-Rae Brader reports
Q. How are both businesses performing? Elegant Resorts is celebrating its 35th anniversary this year and is in brilliant shape. We’re tracking up on 2022, which was one of our best years ever, so we’re really pleased. We’re still seeing quite a sporadic booking pattern, with bookings within three months of travel or outside of nine months, so things are still quite late. It’s a very interesting year, with different peaks and lows from month to month. Europe remains our largest destination and makes up 50% of our business at Elegant Resorts, followed by the Caribbean, Middle East and Indian Ocean. Europe is going from strength to strength, with Italy, Greece and Spain the most popular destinations, and we’ve invested in product development here. We’re seeing growth in our tailor-made and touring product for Africa, Asia and Australasia – these are 300%-400% up but they should be by nature because some of these have only recently opened up. If Only is also trading well and is 40% up versus 2022 and we’re seeing tailor-made and cruise performing exceptionally well.
Q. What’s the trade strategy for this year? We’re investing more in the trade than ever before – that’s an investment in our people, fams and events, and in ensuring all areas of our business are supporting the trade. We’ve got an expanded trade team of six, which is really having an incredible impact. We’ve been working very hard across both businesses to drive new business from agents who haven’t worked with us before and also re-engaging with agents who haven’t booked with us for some time. As a result, we have 20 new agents working with Elegant Resorts this year and we’ve seen a 15% uplift in trade subscribers for our social media and e-marketing. For If Only, this focus on new business has resulted in more than £1 million in sales in the first quarter of the year from agents who hadn’t sold If Only before, plus we achieved a further £917,000 in sales from retailers that hadn’t sold If Only in the past five years by actively engaging with them through the expanded team. We’ve also seen sales numbers grow thanks to If Only’s Facebook and WhatsApp groups. We have more than 1,000 active agents on these and we post daily offers which agents can post on their own platforms. Sales through the agents in these groups are up 28% on 2019.
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ASPIRE JUNE 2023
aspiretravelclub.co.uk
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