For the travel industry, where the supply chain is so interlinked, it would be impossible to be successful without them.
Coming out of the pandemic and into recovery, these partnerships remain as important as ever as we continue assessing how we can all move forward successfully and understand each other’s challenges, particularly in relation to service and delivery.
It is the service part of this that is being focused on at the moment. The outbound travel sector has been decimated over the past two years, and there is not a part of it that has not been impacted.
Every business has had to take decisive cost-saving action to ensure their survival; gut-wrenching decisions predominately focused on the most difficult decision of all – having to let valuable staff go.
The ability for businesses to scale up quickly and cope with the overnight pent-up demand has been frustrating for all parts of the outbound eco-system.
It has left many of us in a place where we have had to quickly try to deliver to our customers without the infrastructure and staffing numbers required to ensure, in some cases, a satisfactory service.
We know the challenges: people have left the industry; unemployment numbers are low; people want more flexibility; and we are not attracting new talent due to the image the industry currently portrays. So what’s the solution?
For me, the answer is relatively straightforward, but it won’t be achieved overnight and in isolation of each other. We work together to find solutions.
Yes, there are long call wait times in some cases, but all of the conversations my team and I have with suppliers tell me they are working as quickly as possible to address these by bringing in and training more staff.
They are deploying people from other areas of the business where they can, and their teams are working extra shifts to try and get through the calls.
We have worked closely with our partners to look at alternative solutions in the short-term.
We have secured priority lines for members, escalation email addresses and live chat options, while our partnerships team has been very hands-on in supporting members achieve solutions through our internal escalation process.
There is also a role for agents to play in this – we need to use the information suppliers send out and publish to ensure we are only calling through when there is no other option.
We have an opportunity now to work together to build back the outbound travel sector and support each other while we are doing this. Finger pointing without any solutions is frankly in no one’s interest.
Kelly Cookes is the Advantage Travel Partnership’s leisure director.
