INSIDE THIS
WEEK Contents
NEWS Hot Stories
Ex-Tui manager forced to pay back £59k; Cobalt collapse highlights air insurance; Agents criticise Cook over price parity; Travel staff ‘weak link in cybersecurity’; MSC orders four ships for luxury market
Round-up Royal Caribbean; Travel Counsellors
WIN!
A 12-day cruise for two to Antarctica with Aurora Expeditions page 40
08
Special Reports Executive Lunch: Guest Esther Rantzen 10 Broadway Travel Conference, Dubrovnik 14 Face to Face: Ben Bouldin/Stuart Byron 16
Talk Back Rowland, LingsWings, Ryanair, Pan Am
NEWS YOU CAN USE Product Disneyland Paris, G Adventures 23
Cruise Crystal, Silversea, A-Rosa, Saga 24 Operator Wendy Wu, Enable Holidays
26
FRONTLINE Comment Giles Hawke, Cosmos/Avalon 32
A Day In The Life Joel Ryan, Beaches 36 Mystery Shopper Tunbridge Wells, Kent 44 DESTINATIONS
Cruise Round-Britain cruises: Staycation at sea 46 Wine: A trip on Germany’s Moselle River 52 Winter sun: Skip the British freeze
59 Indonesia: Review of Star Clippers sailing 67
FRONT COVER Dame Esther Rantzen was guest speaker at a Travel Weekly Executive Lunch page 10 PHOTO: STEVE DUNLOP
Africa Eswatini: Wildlife, culture and charm Uganda: Discover the ‘Pearl of Africa’
BUSINESS Round-up Ryanair, Gatwick, Greybull
72 77
WHAT
LUCY DID THIS WEEK
25 Oct 86 Back page Cobalt Air ceases operations 88 1
2 3
Lucy Huxley Editor-in-chief @Lucy_Huxley
Welcomed 1990s keep-fit guru Mr Motivator into our office for a Travel Weekly workout. Find out why next week!
Moderated the second Atas Conference in Birmingham for more than 300 agents keen to sell more touring and adventure travel.
Was treated, with six colleagues, to a night at The Lion King in the West End by Disneyland Paris, to mark the launch of its brochure.
25 October 2018
travelweekly.co.uk 3 18 04
The number of events, many organised by Travel Weekly, such as this week’s fantastic second Association of Touring & Adventure Suppliers Conference, testifies to the power of face-to-face (see next week’s issue for full coverage). Whether it’s B2C or B2B, people do business with people, and as Dame Esther Rantzen said at our executive lunch, empathy is vital if agents are to relate to customers (page 10). As she points out, older customers who may be travelling
A NOTE FROM THE EDITOR It’s still a people business T
solo for the first time, following a bereavement, may need their self-esteem boosted. I can’t imagine a faceless website ever being able to do
that – but a knowledgeable, compassionate travel agent has every chance of putting an anxious client at ease. This is why agents get so upset when suppliers they have
come to trust start undercutting them with online discounts they can’t match. As we report this week, trials on new pricing models by
Thomas Cook (page 5), which has won a lot of friends in the trade in recent years due to its price parity policy, have ruffled a few feathers. Agents who put so much effort into getting to know their
customers, providing the sort of personalised service Google talks about on page 14, feel they aren’t being valued. It’s hardly new. Agents have fought a battle
against online discounts for more than two decades. But are the tables turning? Google says customers today want to be
looked after in the way agents used to treat them. They’re right – except that good agents never stopped doing just that.
here’s nothing like a busy autumn to remind you how much travel is a business that brings people together.
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