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Agents must look to independent sector
Agents are being offered a service that will add hundreds of holiday villas to their website, something that should help them appeal to the independent traveller. Villaclick.com is offering a white label version of its online villa rental product that can be planted into an agency website and used by an agent or by the consumer directly to book a holiday villa. Villaclick.com previously offered the service for agents to search and book its inventory of 1,600 villas in Southern Europe and the US, but bookings were made only through the villaclick.com website. Agents don’t receive a percentage commission, but instead can add their own mark-up. Villaclick managing director, Matthew Hind told TravelMole: “A lot of agents want to move into this high value market of booking online.” He also said: “Selling package holidays is not easy at present. Tour operators are squeezing margins whilst more and more customers seek to upgrade to a more personal holiday experience. “Customers are using the internet to not only search for the right property but also to organise flights and car hire as well. These are independent holidaymakers, a sector that is growing by 17% year-on-year.” Mr Hind told TravelMole that he thought booking villas and hotels would increasingly become more like flights, i.e. with bookings becoming less dependent on an agent. He said: “I’d say that at the moment about 80% of people wanting to book a villa want to be sold too. It’s not like the flights market where people will book it themselves without going to an agent, but I think it will become more and more like that. It won’t be three or four years, it’ll be more like seven – but it will happen eventually.” He said that in the future Villaclick will look into enabling customers and agents to dynamically-package villa bookings with other product like flights and car rental, to be settled in one transaction. Report by Ginny McGrath
Ginny McGrath
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