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It’s all about survival of the fittest – TravelMole Secret Agent
It’s all about survival of the fittest as the moment.
These last few weeks have been hard. Call volumes are low, very low.
Customers are shopping around for the best deals, rightly so.
We as agents are being undercut at every turn by the tour operators, which l think will be no surprise to anyone. Same old operators every time.
I appreciate that we are all struggling, but operators are doing nothing to maintain the loyalty of agents.
By continuing to undercut us on price, whether it be online or calls direct, is doing nothing for operator-agent relations.
Do you think we will continue to actively promote you? It’s not to say that we wont sell you if we get a booking (wouldn’t cut off my nose to spite my face), but there is no way on this earth that l am going to actively push you when l am having to give away most of my commission.
I would much rather support a tour operator that wants to work with us agents and will do everything to keep us loyal.
This credit crunch will eventually lift, and when it does my loyalty will be to operators that have supported me and respect how important agents can be to their business.
It seems the operators that have good agent relations are the small independent ones, which is great because if you do ever need to speak to them you get a real functioning person.
Not a switchboard asking you to push this button, and this button and then after 5 mins of pushing buttons you get told they are to busy to answer your call and to call later!!! No prizes for guessing who that is.
As you can tell from my little rant l have lost out on a few bookings over the last few weeks due to online discounting, but it is not all doom and gloom.
My repeat trade and recommendations are making up for about 70% of my business at the moment.
This is reassuring, as this confirms that l am not doing anything wrong.
People are coming back to me and recommending me to family and friends because l give good customer service and always try my best to get them the best deal.
So my shout to the big boys is to remember who you are stepping on to get bigger profits for yourselves.
We agents are like elephants…..we never forget!
Phil Davies
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