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‘Use them or lose them’: Focus members warned on air deals
Members of the Advantage Focus4Fares group are not making enough use of the special air fares that are available to them, its project manager Steve Murray has warned.
Despite paying £2,500 a year to be a member of the group, some of its members were “hardly using it at all”, delegates at one of the break-out events at the Advantage Business Travel conference on Tuesday were told.
Mr Murray said Focus4Fares members would have to make sure they were using it, and make sure their staff had the necessary training to use the fares, if airlines were to be persuaded to re-sign the favourable deals they had given the group.
He warned: “You have got to make sure you sell as much as you can or we’ll get lots of egg on our face.”
He said by putting more business through Focus4Fares and less through wholesalers such as Gold Medal Travel and Travel 2, members could improve their profits because “they are taking a margin, and margins are getting tighter.” However he conceded that Focus4Fares could never “wholly replace what a good wholesaler can do.”
Delegates were also informed that there was currently a problem tracing how much was booked through Focus4Fares because Advantage could only trace bookings made directly through the portal. However Amity Travel’s Paul Gardener, who is closely involved with the project,said he believed it was “getting on for £5-£6million” which while up from the figure of £1million a year ago was still a “tiny” amount.
Read other stories from the Advantage Business Travel Conference:
07-Oct-2003 Agents warned they will have to share GDS costs with airlines
08-Oct-2003 ‘Overrides will disappear’
08-Oct-2003 Plan for new worldwide independent agency force
08-Oct-2003 Advantage admits single GDS plan for business members
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