NEWS ROUND-UP
Select World Travel agent makes record £450k sale
Juliet Dennis
juliet.dennis@
travelweekly.co.uk
Hannah Vincent was on a day off when she received an enquiry that led to the biggest booking of her career – worth nearly £450,000.
The managing director of Select
World Travel in Poole got a text message from a regular client as she took her baby daughter Leah to a ‘mini gym’ session. “They wanted a long-haul trip
for a family group of 29,” Vincent said. “I had to wait until my daughter was having her afternoon nap before I could start work on it – I was desperate to get her to bed! “As soon as she was asleep, I
contacted Andy Dawson in the reservations department at Lusso as he had looked after them previously.” After working on the 10-day booking to the Seychelles for just over a week, Hannah was copied in to the family’s emails. She said: “I was out for dinner on a Saturday night, but I replied straight away to a few questions on email – I knew it’d be worth it. “From then on, I was on
It’s trailer cash! Essex agency makes trio of bookings worth £169k
Mother and daughter Jill and Emily Trumble, of Essex-based Encore Travel, have recorded three big bookings totalling £169,500 since opening on the high street – in a pop-up trailer. The Travel Trust Association
agency booked 54 passengers on an Osmonds-themed coach tour with Newmarket Holidays
“I had to wait until my daughter was having a nap before I could start work on it”
tenterhooks and checked my emails until 10pm every night so I didn’t miss any family questions!” Vincent, who works four days a
week, spent another week working on the booking, often out of office hours – including securing all 29 flight seats on a Sunday from home. She said: “Some wanted business-class, some premium economy and it had to be direct.
Andy and I ended up speaking on a Sunday night to confirm things: it would have put a spanner in the works if we hadn’t done that. “It took a while to work out the accommodation in two-bed villas, senior and junior hotel suites.” By the Friday of that week,
the £448,685 booking to Constance Lemuria in Praslin in the Seychelles was confirmed for later this year. Vincent won a Lusso agent
incentive for a seven-night holiday to the Maldives for her booking. She added: “Lusso had already planned to take agency staff to dinner, but now they’ve said we’ll all get champagne!”
£38,482 and a family of five on an August road trip around California, costing £31,269. All three customers stopped at the pop-up trailer in Chelmsford high street during peaks. Co-owner Emily Trumble said
in 2020, for £99,846. They also booked a family
of three to Dubai and the Maldives over New Year for
12
travelweekly.co.uk 4 April 2019
the Newmarket booking was the agency’s biggest. “When I added it all up at the end of the month I was overwhelmed: we’d doubled, if notmore, our figures.” Encore Travel has already
booked space on the high street for next year’s peaks.
SMART: The app is available on Apple and Android devices
RECORD: Hannah Vincent’s booking for 29 people to the Seychelles was the biggest of her career
Ponders Travel develops own cruise app in wake of GDPR
Cruise specialist agent Ponders Travel has launched an app for its customers that delivers quotes, offers and more. Owner Clare Dudley decided
to develop a Ponders Travel app last September after the two-shop agency’s database fell from about 23,000 to 2,000 customers when General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came into force. As well as sending quotes and
offers, the app allows Dudley’s nine- person team in Cambridgeshire to publicise events and competitions. Customers can also access
information about cruise lines and itinerary destinations. The launch was delayed until
last week so software developers Net Effect could build in a new quoting system for the agency. Dudley said: “I see pretty much
everyone with their phone stuck to their face, so when the app was proposed to me I thought it would be perfect. “We could email quotes. But
seeing as everyone is using their phones these days, we thought it would be better to have an app.” Dudley hopes to demonstrate the app at events Ponders Travel attends around East Anglia. “Hopefully, it will help us grow our database,” she said.
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