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Kicking off with something new?
TravelMole opinion, Travel Convention day one, by Jeremy Skidmore
Another year, another convention, but this year we are told ‘it’s something new, it’s something different’.
Certainly, outside the Convention something new was going down: the Global takeover had people wondering whether 1,000 high street travel agents were about to be rebranded as a strong lager, with the dubious knickname of ‘wife beater’.
Don’t worry, assured Stella, ours is not a consumer brand, although you might see a Harvey World or two pop up.
Inside the Convention, enter the smooth operators, TUI’s Peter Long and Thomas Cook’s Manny Fontenla-Novoa.
Manny, perhaps wary of being stitched up after his ITT performance, chose to whisper his answers, leaving journalists none the wiser about most of his opinions.
Both did, though, make a robust defence of the package holiday, claiming that’s what customers wanted.
2007? It took us back to 1987.
In the afternoon, polite disagreements. “Content is king,” claimed Graham Donohue of TUI. Not so – it’s the customer that’s king, countered Global’s Andrew Botterill.
Wexas’ Nathan Philpot, fresh from marshalling the youtravel defence in their 5-1 thrashing of C&M in the previous day’s football match, felt compelled to join in the disagreement.
“I don’t agree with Andrew that scale is necessary,” he said.
And then suddenly an agent stands up and back we go to 1987.
“Why are you, British Airways, charging us 50p a minute to call you? How many other businesses would charge their customers to call them?”
Cue the first applause of the day and, for a moment, you really could have been back in the aggressive bear-pit of an ABTA Convention of yesteryear.
Adam Daniels of BA waffled about its website and how they worked with the trade before conceding they would ‘look at the situation’, but added most phone call questions could be answered with a simple look at the website (roughly translated as “tough – we’re not making a change”).
An interesting day, but something new? I’m not so sure.
Jeremy Skidmore
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