The Interview
Andrew Flintham and Richard Sofer
Tui’s Northern Europe managing director and its commercial and business development director speak to Lucy Huxley on a wide range of topics
Tui on . . . Atol licences and market leadership Andrew Flintham: “While we love [monitoring the size of Atols] in the industry – even my boss loves it, and my boss’s boss loves it – customers don’t really give two hoots about it. We want to do the best job for our customers on holiday. It doesn’t matter who the biggest is, you just want to be the best. “It’s quite simple and
straightforward: we are the best and therefore we will get the customers that come to us because of that. There is no official definition of market performance or market share in our business. Most things that people talk about are either predictions or conjecture, or both. “We do really well with
[consumer] trust, in terms of all the metrics, in terms of brand reference, in terms of all those things that say we think we are the leading holiday company.” Richard Sofer: “Don’t assume
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our Atol will stay static. The 1,500 hotels [added to Tui’s 2024 range] are for our package holiday programme.” AF: “There will probably come changes to that lovely number that I spent half of my life looking at and analysing. “We are pretty broad as a
business, whereas Jet2 are much bigger than us on flight-only because they’re a much bigger airline than us. Our business is a different shape to theirs. Therefore, you’ll end up with us being that leading holiday provider, across all those different facets and attributes. “We’re adding another 1,500
hotels. Things like that show that, with our flying and third-party flying, we’re going to increase the range and the flexibility that customers can pick from. We want to be the best holiday company for consumers; that is going to come in many different shapes and forms and we will compete on every front.”
Tui on . . . increasing staff in airports AF: “We will have way more people at airports this summer. We are going to have a much bigger airport presence both airside and landside. Do we believe that’s here for ever? We don’t know. We all used to happily just sidle up to a self-service bag drop, wander through the airport and think that was great because we didn’t want lots of people bothering us. I don’t think anybody knows how that’s going to evolve.”
Tui on . . . in-resort reps and using technology The operator said the number of reps
is at pre-pandemic levels ‘or higher’ for the summer season. AF: “We introduced the [mobile] app which gave a whole host of customer self-service capabilities. But 80% of our customers were still going through a repped hotel. Pre-pandemic, we were face-to-face plus technology. In the pandemic, for various reasons but clearly one of them being cost, we had fewer people, more technology. “Now we’re back to almost
more people proportionately [but] with the technology getting better and better. “It used to be quite a blanket approach – if you put so many
We are really happy if we get ambitious third- party agents that want to sell our products. We don’t not want to sell through them
travelweekly.co.uk
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