Rather than secure a booking for itself, Riviera decided to pass the potential customer on to their local travel agent – Spear Travels. Derek Adams, director at Spear Travels, who works at the Stoke branch, said it was a nice surprise to receive such support from an operator.

“[The customer] rang and spoke to Riviera with some questions about a river cruise that [they] were doing, and wanted some more information,” said Adams. “In the course of the conversation with Riviera they said they would prefer to book it face to face.”

“Riviera must have looked up a local agent to the person and we’re about 15 miles away so the first we knew about it was the next morning when we got a phone call from the lady asking for directions to our shop.”

The customer in question eventually booked her voyage. Adams said the behaviour from Riviera was unusual in the current climate. “It’s nice to have a tour operator that actually sends people to us that can be mutual clients to the travel agents,” he said.

“It’s the behaviour of a section of tour operators that do value travel agents. There are some that do and some that don’t.” Adams added that Spear Travels had seen an increase in the amount of Riviera Travel holidays booked over the past year.

Joseph Grimley, head of agency sales at Riviera Travel said: “We work hard on our relationships with agents and do whatever we can to support their sales.

“If a client calls us and asks if there are any local agents they can book with, we will check on our system which independent agents they have locally and give the client the contact details of the agent. “I believe this happened last week with Spear Travels in Stoke picking up a booking from us.”