Several agents told TTG clients were downgrading their rooms or flights, planning to take less holidays and even cancelling trips as the crisis unfolds, even if they lost their deposits.

It comes after nearly a quarter of respondents to TTG’s latest Travel Agent Tracker survey said price increases were among the main issues affecting their businesses.

Discounting remains common among around three-quarters of respondents, while nearly half said they were sometimes being asked to price match – with others reporting even more frequent requests.

Off Broadway Travel’s Mark Beattie said in his experience, clients were not explicitly asking about deals and discounts, but were tailoring their holidays differently.

“I think customers are being a little more savvy with their money in terms of the number of holidays they go on or their class of travel,” he told TTG.

“So, if they previously wanted a club room and a business class flight, they might keep their business class flight if they’re going mid- to long-haul but reduce their room slightly."

Beattie said while most clients were becoming more price-conscious, there were differences in how and where they are looking to make savings.

He added that although the cost-of-living crisis hadn’t explicitly affected his clients, more were choosing to go away for shorter breaks or were just having one fewer holiday a year.

“Luckily, a lot of our clients will go away on two or three holidays a year or more," he said. "What we’re finding is where, as before, we might have a client going on four holidays, they might just say, ’we’ll curtail that and reduce it to three’.”

Beattie estimated only around 10-15% of customers during the last couple of months had cancelled a holiday to put money towards another.

ArrangeMy Escape travel consultant Ryan Sowney said customers were asking where they could make savings. “We don’t typically discount very much here," he said.

"But what we’d normally do is if they’re really price conscious, we’d try to add value such as a lounge or parking at the airport instead of discounting and devaluing the service we’re offering."

Sowney said his store had introduced a price match policy because customers were coming in and hoping to book within a price range they had seen separately online. He added most customers tended not to use the policy in the end and would pay more because of the service being provided by the agency. 

He predicted price would start to become more of a factor in the next few months when people really start looking to book a holiday, given slightly later booking trends post-pandemic.

’New landscape’

Andrew Earle, head partner at Andrew Earles Holidays, said some clients were reluctant to pay their balances this year. "Some people are trying to amend their holidays from this year to next, but when they see how much it goes up, they’re cancelling and losing their deposit,” he told TTG.

Earle said this pattern of amending holidays had started with the pandemic when clients needed to move holidays in 2020 and 2021 to the year after. He added administrative changes were also catching people out and causing cancellations.

“We had a guy who was going to Mexico this July with Tui – his child didn’t class as an adult but would do during the holiday, so the price has gone up by about £1,000. He said he wouldn’t pay the extra cost and cancelled it, losing a £1,500 deposit in the process.”

Earle added the cost-of-living crisis was making customers think twice. “People are starting to see the increase in household bills and shopping bills and it’s a case of how customers want to spend their money going forwards in this new landscape.”