NEWS CONFERENCE REPORT
Barrhead Travel Business Partner Conference: Agency holds event at the Trump Turnberry hotel for the second year running. Ben Ireland reports from Ayrshire
Barrhead management team: Julie Taylor, Sharon Munro, Bill Munro, Karen Breen and Jacqueline Dobson
Barrhead Travel creates social media sales team
Barrhead Travel has revealed a team of agents will work exclusively on social media, giving holiday advice and making bookings.
Eight staff will start in January and more could follow if bookings through channels such as Facebook and Twitter continue to grow. Barrhead will recruit trained
travel agents, but specifically those with a good understanding of social media, either professionally or in a personal capacity. “We recruited a specialist team to help with our social media
“Social media is a big channel
“We want to give the customer the choice to talk to us in whichever channel works for them”
presence and it’s worked really well so far,” said chief executive Sharon Munro. “So we’ve decided to take that one step further and have a separate sales team from January who will be purely dealing with customers’ enquiries and requests.
Munro invites staff to brew up ideas
Barrhead Travel agents are being asked to shape the future of the agency by sitting down for cups of tea with senior management. Chief executive Sharon Munro’s monthly Brew with the Boss scheme is intended to formalise feedback from frontline staff about how the business can improve. It began in September and Munro said some of the agents’ ideas will be introduced in the coming months. She said: “It gives us more of a chance to speak to the people at
the coalface and make sure the decisions we are taking are the right ones. Our staff are fantastic at coming up with innovations.”
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travelweekly.co.uk 16 November 2017
and we are at the stage where we needed to set up a division for it. “It’s a very different way of communicating with people. We want to give the customer the choice to talk to us in whichever channel works for them.” Barrhead’s bookings for 2018
are already up 23% and bookings for winter 2018-19 are up more than 20%. “Next year is looking very positive,” Munro said at the business partner conference. The figures, which include its homeworking network and managed service branches, come in a year that saw Barrhead Travel open its second shop in England, in Leicester, and announced plans to open its first in Northern Ireland. Munro also revealed a new online client portal that customers can access to view their quote or booking and add personal details at any time rather than calling or visiting a branch. New payment methods have also been introduced, such as finance and direct debit options to help customers spread payments.
Agency continues expansion with luxury division
Barrhead Travel has launched a luxury division to target high-net-worth individuals. Nine members of staff will
work on the team, which will focus on luxury holidays, and introduced in the same year that Barrhead launched an events department. The agency has struck partnerships with companies such as jewellers, Michelin- starred restaurants and car firms such as Bentley and Aston Martin, which will have a presence at Barrhead events. “There’s a lot of high-net-
worth individuals across the country,” said chairman Bill Munro. “More people are spending. They would rather enjoy life with their grandchildren, so there are a lot of three-generation holidays in the luxury sector.”
Bill Munro
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