Virgin pledges to stand by business travel agents

GBTA Conference special: Virgin Atlantic pledged its support for the Guild of Business Travel Agents, saying its members carried out a valuable service the airline would be unable to do on its own.

The airline’s Paul Dickinson, who is being promoted from marketing and sales director to customer services director, said Virgin’s long haul flights often required careful planning.

“We need Travel Management Companies, because we are useless at serving people’s needs unless they’ve got a straight point-to-point booking,” said Dickinson.

To demonstrate the complexity of bookings, Dickinson analysed a flight from Heathrow to JFK, New York in November 2003.

He said return fares on the flight varied from pounds 110 to 4,570 and tickets were sold in 12 countries; some 63 per cent in the UK, 14 per cent in the US, the rest in 10 different countries, including Uganda.

Several passengers were part of frequent flyers’ clubs or reward schemes, 31 had special meals and two requested duty-free goods.

“This is not the same as booking low-cost airlines. There are huge levels of complexities and we need travel managers to sort out the issues for us,” he said.

However, Dickinson warned TMCs needed to maintain their standards of service.
“I urge you to invest and be aware of what is going on in the market with the development of online players,” he said.

Dickinson said most of its routes, with the exception of Heathrow-Shanghai, were operating with high load factors and predicted fares across the Atlantic would rise, particularly as the price of oil is rising.

But he said it was a challenge to convince passengers to pay more for flights.
“People’s expectations of prices are changing,” he said. “I paid 49p to go to Pisa and now I’m pretty disgruntled if I have to pay over a fiver!”

Dickinson said Virgin was developing its website but was not totally reliant upon it.

“What you save in commissions on travel agents, you spend five times over in developing the site and marketing to get people on line.”

Virgin is spending £50m on a new upper class product, which will be rolled out throughout its fleet this year. Cabin seats will convert into flat beds and passengers can take off and land in a reclined position.

New routes in 2005 include Sydney, Dubai, Nassau and Cuba.

Report by Jeremy Skidmore from the GBTA Conference, Shanghai

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