During his 33 years in the industry, George Morgan-Grenville has been Abercrombie & Kent Group managing director and founded Red Savannah, but musing on the buoyant sales of the past eight months he admits: “I’ve never lived through a period like it.”
By early July, Red Savannah was 24% over its projected gross sales for all of 2022, and Morgan-Grenville explains: “From late November 2021 sales have been utterly intense. This has been a phenomenal year. ”
The operator specialises in tailor-made luxury villas, safaris, gulet sailings and beach holidays, and Europe has dominated bookings, followed by the Indian Ocean, the Caribbean and North America. Customers have been keen to get away, with average lead times dropping from six to three months since the pandemic.
For those seeking new experiences, later this year the operator will launch an inaugural Grand Tour of Europe by Private Jet tour, which will take place in 2023. It has been increasing its villa portfolio and in April 2021 it acquired US-based Italian villa specialist Homebase Abroad. It has also boosted its range of gulets in the Aegean and expanded into the Adriatic this year.
Morgan-Grenville says business through the trade is growing and stresses that the brand “totally understands the importance of agents and treats them very well.” He continues: “In the pandemic agents discovered the importance of being able to trust the suppliers with whom they worked.
“During the pandemic we didn’t have a single legal case or chargeback, and we didn’t issue any refund credit notes. We refunded every passenger who wanted to be refunded. So I think the brand came out of it very strongly, particularly in terms of trust, both from agents and from our clients.”
LANDMARK ANNIVERSARY
The operator celebrated its 10-year anniversary in 2021, but the pandemic meant a celebratory party was postponed until its 11th birthday in June 2022. The event was hosted on a decommissioned British Airways Boeing 747, which was turned into an event space in 2020 after logging 13,398 flights and almost 60 million miles.
The team enjoyed a champagne reception on the tarmac at Cotswold Airport in Kemble, before having dinner in the refurbished passenger cabin, with performances by Masai Warriors, an African song and dance group and an opera trio.
Morgan-Grenville says the event was worth the wait. “It was a great party and there was something marvellously appropriate about doing it on a decommissioned 747, because there’s so much history wrapped up in that plane.”
During the party Morgan-Grenville gifted Cartier and Breitling watches to five members of staff who have been with Red Savannah since its inception in 2011. “When I started Red Savannah the first thing I wanted to do was to get the very best staff that I could find,” Morgan-Grenville recalls.
“It was a question of trying to sell my vision to them as to why they should join this fledgling startup, and why it was worth them risking their seniority in their current jobs, and in fact their entire lifestyle, by joining a new company. I’ve always been so grateful to them for having the courage and the confidence to do that.”
Today Red Savannah has a team of 29, and is currently recruiting for five positions in operations and its Europe and villa sales departments, as Morgan-Grenville says business returned with “ incredible intensity” following the easing of Covid-19 restrictions.
The situation is in sharp contrast to September 2020, when a third of the team were let go due to the impact of the pandemic, at a time when Morgan-Grenville remembers feeling like “there was no end in sight.”
He says finding expert staff is still “very difficult”, citing factors including senior travel industry staff leaving the sector during the pandemic and a lack of new recruits. He also highlights the impact of Brexit, which has stifled the operator’s ability to recruit students studying tourism at European universities for summer internships.
He adds: “Maybe the industry doesn’t have the attraction that it used to, and I think a lot of people are attracted by the world of tech. But these things tend to be cyclical, and I think people will come back into the more conventional industries.”
CUSTOMER EXPECTATIONS
Morgan-Grenville says during his career the desires of luxury travellers have changed dramatically. “People today don’t just want to see, they want to touch, they want to feel, they want to experience, they want to be,” he explains. “They want to feel they’ve got under the skin of a destination and they’re not looking for a bland encounter.”
For Red Savannah that means finding people on the ground and resources that can bring a destination to life. For example, before clients travel to Egypt they are sent a copy of The Yacoubian Building, a novel by Egyptian author Alaa-Al-Aswany, to help them understand the political tensions in the region.
Red Savannah can also arrange for them to have a coffee with a local Egyptian journalist. Morgan-Grenville continues: “By the time they leave they haven’t just seen the buildings of the past. They’ve also understood the pressures of the present in a very relaxed and informative way and really feel they’ve understood the country they’ve been travelling in.”
