Derek Jones

Every year, a new prediction circulates that travel agents are on the brink of extinction. Most recently, the usual doomsday narrative has been fuelled by the rapid rise of AI travel search. Ask a chatbot where to go for a “relaxing beach break with culture” and it will oblige with enthusiasm, lists, videos, average temperatures and possibly a recipe for paella if you get your prompts tangled. There’s no denying AI has raised the bar for inspiration . Customers can now explore possibilities instantly and visually, without leaving the sofa. That’s not a threat to agents, it’s just the new landscape. Where things get interesting is what happens next.  Because choice doesn’t create clarity, it creates overwhelm . P eople don’t want more holiday options. They want the right one. This is where the agent’s role shifts, but absolutely does not diminish. Agents no longer need to spend hours sifting through brochures or loading endless package searches. AI can handle the broad filterin...

Back in the day, when the high street was dominated by the big vertically integrated retailers – Going Places, First Choice Hypermarkets, Thomas Cook and Lunn Poly – the number of travel agents employed by those four businesses alone added up to about 25,000.  That’s a lot of travel agents, and with attrition running at 25%, over 6,000 people needed to be recruited every year!  And the only way to get anywhere near to those numbers was to zone in on the government sponsored youth employment schemes. The names of the schemes changed as the years rolled by – from the Youth Opportunities Scheme (YOP), to the Youth Training Scheme (YTS), to Modern Apprentice (MA) – but the process each year was the same; target as many sixteen year-old school leavers as possible and take them through a combination of in-house training and work experience, turning the majority of them into smart, professional, travel agents with a passion for the job that would see many of them build long and suc...

The last time I speculated in this column about the reasons behind a surprising travel acquisition I landed myself in an awkward spot of bother with the buyer.  It was my good friend John Hays who’d just bought Bath Travel and I suggested that the two brands were not a natural fit.  I think John has forgiven me but in my defence I did go on to say that if anyone could make it work it would be him, and on that count he has gone on to prove me right.  Looking back at that deal now it’s clear to see why the Hays approach to retailing applied to a geographically complementary store network has been a real success story.  Hindsight is all well and good but John had the foresight to see the opportunity and to invest in High Street expansion when most others were moving in the opposite direction. I was reminded of this when I woke up this morning to the news that On The Beach had acquired Classic Collection.  My first reaction was that this must have been the result of...

Der Touristik, the parent group of Kuoni, owns just one hotel.  It’s called Playitas and it’s tucked away in a quiet corner of Fuerteventura.  How it came to be owned by Der Touristik is a long story - too long to describe now - but I think it’s fair to say that it wasn’t part of a finely tuned strategy; more just a happy accident. We love our hotel in the same way that some parents love an unplanned and unexpected only child.  For a while we stumbled around not really knowing what to do with it but over time Playitas has developed into a real success story, becoming one of Europe’s best Sports Resort.  It now has a full size Olympic swimming pool, tennis courts, a state of the art road bike and mountain bike facility, the biggest gym I’ve ever seen and an almost endless list of activities, all designed to tone and hone the already rippling bodies of Europe’s elite fitness community. So it was that last week I found myself having breakfast in a restaurant full of Lyc...

Monday Feeling positive today despite the setback of being told in Court that we can’t sell Monarch’s Gatwick Airport slots for millions of pounds.  This is clearly the wrong decision.  Why shouldn’t we be allowed to sell things that the company we’re representing never owned, to someone else who won’t own them either, even after they’ve bought them from us?  It’s obvious. Tuesday Woke up feeling a bit troubled.  I thought I’d finally got my head round the whole airport slot allocation thing but in my dreams I keep seeing cute little cartoon airplanes queuing outside the locked gates of a crowded airport, begging to be given a chance to fly, whilst inside on the runway big old cigar smoking jumbos are parked in front of the terminal waiting to take off (half empty), for the daily hop to Paris. “Use it or lose it!” they all shout as each plane takes off. Made myself a strong coffee and sat down to read the House of Commons Briefing Paper on Airport Slots for the eleve...

Earlier this week on a TV news bulletin, when asked what tour operators were doing to help customers affected by Hurricane Irma, the ‘Travel Expert’ in the studio replied that they were ‘making it up as they go along’. The thing with hurricanes, like pretty much every weather event, is that you can’t predict where or when they’re going to spring up and once in motion, it’s equally difficult to predict where they’re going to go. Hurricane Irma is a meteorologist’s dream, breaking a swathe of records as it sweeps through the Caribbean and on to Florida.  Irma is the first storm in recorded history to sustain wind speeds of 185 mph for 37 hours straight; the strongest storm in the Atlantic ever; and the longest ever category five hurricane.  Irma has generated more energy than the first eight Atlantic storms of this season put together, and when Irma was joined on Saturday by Hurricane José it was the first time in history that there have been two hurricanes with 150 mph winds in...

A few weeks ago the news was full of obituaries for one of my retail heroes, the Swedish founder IKEA, Ingvar Kamprad. Ikea is retail Marmite; for some, the mere mention of the name sends shudders down the spine, but for others it’s the happy prospect of a half day spent meandering round the shop’s curious (and rigorously enforced) one-way-system, followed by several hours fiddling with an Allen key, whilst nursing a bad back and trying to avoid a family bust up. Love it or loathe it (and I love it), IKEA turned furniture retailing on its head and brought Scandinavian design into the reach of millions of customers, continuing its entrepreneurial style through the decades and always staying ahead of the curve. So, when IKEA’s head of sustainability claimed last year that we’ve reached ‘peak stuff’ it struck a chord with me. Stuff, clutter, call it what you like, there’s a growing sense that too many things are crowding into our lives and our thinking. I’ve just been introduc...

When Michael Owen decided that playing for Manchester United was an acceptable thing for an ex-Liverpool player to do, he must have realised that he was pushing himself towards the bottom of the ‘people that Scousers admire most’ list. Like many Liverpool fans I’ve tried hard to ignore Michael ever since, even to the point of muting the commentary when he’s chosen to share his intelligent, unbiased football insights. Imagine my annoyance then, when without warning his voice turned up on the radio in my car last week: ‘Hi! I’m Michael Owen and I know what it’s like to be injured at work.’ Brilliant! Two of the most unwelcome things in my life, Michael Owen and accident at work lawyers, combined in one radio ad to create a supernova of aggravation. I turned the radio off and in the silence that followed began to wonder if Michael had actually sued his employer for damages when he twisted his little toe on the penalty spot (or whatever it was that took him out of action for so lo...

I came to Berlin late. A corporate career working exclusively for Swiss and German owned businesses has at times made European cities like Zurich and Hannover feel like second homes. The regular rounds of meetings and conferences have at some point in the last twenty years taken me to most of the major European capitals. But for some reason, until this week, Berlin had eluded me. To be introduced to Berlin properly for the first time in 2017, post-Brexit, post-Trump, and in the week of the French Presidential election, was a sobering experience, even more so when I found myself listening to a line-up of senior German politicians sharing their thoughts on the future of Europe, in German, to a mostly German audience… and me. It hard to describe exactly how Germans view the result of our EU Referendum, especially when you only have anecdotal evidence collected on a two-day visit, but on a walkabout in Potsdamer Platz (more of which later) I struck up a conversation with a local. W...

I can’t imagine my life without travel. ‘Find a job you love’, so the saying goes, ‘and you’ll never work a day in your life’. In the last ten years I’ve been lucky enough to visit more than 30 countries and my constant companion (the only thing that I know for certain has been on all of those trips with me) has been my passport. We have a lot in common, me and my passport. As we’ve travelled together, we’ve aged together; the cover has gradually become weatherworn and wrinkled, not unlike my face. The stamps and visas emblazoned on the pages inside trigger memories of places visited and friends made. We’ve spent so much time together I think, by a process of osmosis, we probably share the same DNA. So this week was a sad week – it was time to renew. Arriving back from Stockholm late on Wednesday night, I slid my old passport face down for the very last time into the scanner at the Heathrow border. And as the glass gate opened in front of me, I said a quiet (but still quit...

A year is a long time: The last time we headed to the attic to dust off our baubles, Cameron was Prime Minister and Boris was Mayor of London, the EU Referendum wouldn’t be announced for another two months and the bookies were giving Donald J Trump a (generous) 2% chance of becoming the next President of the United States. The first sign that things were starting to get a bit weird was when Leicester City climbed to the top of the Premier League, but back then we knew with complete certainty that it wouldn’t last. We settled into our festive break safe in the knowledge that all was just as it should be. I don’t need to tell you what happened next! If you find yourself in a few years’ time struggling with the ‘What was the Year?’ round in your local pub quiz, my advice is simple - just say 2016! For travel it’s been yet another year of geopolitical challenges. I’m not sure if I can remember exactly when terrorist attacks stopped being exceptional events and became part of the...

Some products lend themselves to very highly targeted marketing opportunities. I’m thinking here of the sort of things that end up being advertised on small posters above men’s urinals in motorway service station toilets. Currently filling this particular marketing spot is a poster featuring three naked men, each holding a hat over his Cox and Kings. Well, two of them are holding the hat; the middle man’s hat appears to be levitating of its own accord, supported we can only imagine by his very own medically assisted, erm… hat stand. This thought was running around my head as I was having my hair cut last week. The usual - a number three at the back and sides, and shorten the top to match. Simple haircuts need simple tools and so my barber comes simply equipped with a comb, a good pair of scissors, an electric trimmer and a hairdryer. The hairdryer by the way is not for drying, it’s for blowing any stray (mostly grey) hairs off my shoulders when he’s finished. Notably miss...

Australians like to tell it as it is. In 1989 when the Transport Accident Commission wanted a powerful road safety campaign to emphasize the personal costs of drink driving they came up with possibly the best advertising slogan ever: ‘If you drink, then drive, you’re a bloody idiot.’ In that year there were 776 deaths on Australian roads; by 2012 it had fallen to 303. Anyone who’s been to Australia in the last decade will have heard that phrase; it’s still used as a friendly warning in pubs all the time. So when the Foreign Office launched a public consultation on its travel advice and said it was looking at the Australian system I was immediately keen to know exactly how it worked. I have to be honest, deep down I was hoping that somewhere on the Aussie Government website I’d find the phrase ‘If you go to North Korea, you’re a bloody idiot.’ Sadly, that’s not the case but as I expected, their advice is clearer and stronger. The website is just called Smartraveller, nic...

I could kick myself.  I fell for it. I thought I knew my country.  I thought I understood who we were and what we stood for.  Sure, there were always going to be a few people at the edges who wanted to pull up the shutters and stand alone; who saw immigration as a mortal threat to our way of life; who dreamt of a return to a mythical ‘better time’ when we were in control of our own destiny. But as the EU Referendum debate has taken hold I’ve realised that I was wrong.  I seriously misjudged Britain (or more accurately, England).  This is possibly the most depressing conclusion of my lifetime.  It means that the values I hold dear, values that I thought I shared with the vast majority of people in this country are not in fact the default values of a sizeable share of the people in Britain.  I thought that tolerance, compassion and inclusiveness were part of our DNA and I was proud to be called British. Whatever the outcome of the EU Referen...

There’s a scene in Toy Story 2 (the one with Big Al’s Toy Barn) where Andy’s mum has a garage sale on the lawn at the front of the house. Boxes full of once cherished toys are laid out on a table ready to be sold to the highest bidder. It was this scene that jumped into my mind when Tui announced the sale of all of its specialist holiday businesses last week. Will Waggott has gathered together all of Peter Long’s precious toys and put them on show at the end of the drive for any passers-by to pick over. Tui, like Andy’s mum, knows that the special toys need to be kept, even if it’s just for old times’ sake. So Woody and Buzz (Crystal and Lakes & Mountains) have been taken inside and popped back under the bed, whilst Wheezy, Slinky and Hamm have been boxed together in a job lot with all of the other (now unloved) toys. But when the trestle table has fifty toys on it, it’s inevitable that there will be a Big Al on the scene trying to separate the collectors’ items from ...

Many independent travel agents will never really trust that Kuoni can run its own chain of retail stores and continue to support them to the same degree that other ‘trade only’ suppliers do. I always knew it was going to be a challenge to keep the trade onside once we decided to open Kuoni branded shops. Let’s be honest, the track record of those that went before us wasn’t good. I remember being told by a top independent agent some twenty years ago that the reward for winning Thomson ‘Agent of the Month’ was a certificate for the back office wall… and a Lunn Poly shop next door! And as if the threat of a store next door wasn’t enough, this was followed by in-house discounting levels that were uneconomical to follow and eventually by permanent online price reductions. It’s no wonder nobody trusts us. Agents have learnt that trusting the word of Foxy Loxy tour operators, like dumb Chicken Lickens, is not a sensible long term strategy. So it’s worth taking a moment here t...

I worry that somewhere, sinking under the flotsam and jetsam of unsolicited e-mails in my inbox, is the one that really is going to quadruple my sales conversion, take my business to another level, create a world class digital experience, halve my printing costs, deliver sustainable double digit growth, cure my male pattern baldness and improve my sex life. Worse, I worry that there might actually be a proper e-mail in there, maybe even one from my boss asking me a critical question that needs to be answered yesterday … or last week … or last month! I’ve done everything the IT doctor told me I should do. I’ve ‘moved to junk’, replied ‘opt out’, blocked and unsubscribed. I’ve even been crazy (and desperate) enough to reply to a few, before realising that, in this direction, madness lies. Accepting then that there is nothing to be done other than reading at the least the first few lines of each fresh attempt to change my life, I have become a reluctant expert on the tricks, tacti...

Innovation has always been at the heart of travel. The great travel pioneers of the 19th century created mass-market leisure travel by packaging components together to create affordable rail trips for working class families. In the 1960s the same concept was applied to Mediterranean beach holidays, harnessing the benefits of jet propulsion technology developed during the Second Word War. Less than 20 years after the first British passenger jet aircraft, the De Havilland Comet, entered service in 1952, commercial flights began on the Boeing 747. By the time Concorde took to the skies in 1976, the speed of passenger air travel had increased by a staggering 1,000 miles per hour in less than 25 years. Incredibly, in the 40 years since, it’s actually slowed down by 700 miles per hour. A brand new Airbus A320 has a cruising speed less than half that of Concorde. This wasn’t supposed to happen; progress is supposed to do just that – progress! But in the case of civil avia...

So Virgin Holidays has decided to stop offering its products for sale through travel agents, saying: ‘It’s just the way things are going these days.’ The rationale, according to Virgin Holidays is that when they sell through the trade they don’t talk to the customer directly and they need to make sure that the booking experience is in line with theirs, which they can only do if it’s direct with the customer. But hang on… is this really just the way things are going these days? I suppose that depends what they mean. If your strategy is to constantly and aggressively offer lower prices in your own channels than in other travel agents then of course that’s the way things are going. No sensible agent is going to support a tour operator that blatantly undercuts them on its website – there are only so many 10% weekend discounts an agent can take before they decide it’s not worth the biscuit anymore. Coincidentally 10% is the share of Virgin’s business that was left...

Volkswagen's sneaky software and rigged emissions tests have revealed that not only are the diesel engines in question a little dirtier than we thought – so too is Volkswagen’s reputation. Up to 11 million customers could be affected worldwide, with owners disappointed with the company’s dishonesty and underhand tactics. It’s an erosion of trust that will take years rather than months to overcome. Customers’ feelings are understandable; this is a company that’s been giving it the gung-ho in relation to green policies. Only last year the company claimed in its sustainability report: “We aim to be the world’s most successful, fascinating and sustainable automobile manufacturer. This is the target we set ourselves for 2018.” Oh dear! The environmentally-friendly diesels were a myth and Volkswagen has had to slope off to its awards room and hand back accolades including Green Car of the Year. So when it’s all gone wrong, where do you start in rebuilding your reputation? The a...