Jonathon Woodall-Johnston, Hays Travel’s chief operating officer, is cautioning the trade against adopting a price-matching – or price- beating – strategy, warning it will only come back to bite agents when it comes to turning a profit or trying to sell on the basis of their expertise.

Woodall-Johnston wants Hays Travel Independence Group (IG) members to “value their worth” and to avoid “driving the market down” with discounts after highlighting what he described at the recent Hays IG conference as an increasingly “fierce” culture of discounting among members – especially those with call centre operations.

“From a retail perspective, we’ve seen growth across IG members, and it’s the same with homeworkers, but less in the contact centre or telesales environment,” Woodall-Johnston tells TTG. “I think they’ve fallen into discount marketing. It’s not necessarily just at point of sale. We’ve not done that [within Hays] for many years and it hasn’t done us any harm.”

Dame Irene Hays believes the situation has arisen, in part, due to the vast complexities affecting the market such as climate change, geopolitics and economic uncertainty.

“When you have a conflation of all of these, you need talented people to navigate flight scheduling changes, destination changes, or changes in [people’s] financial circumstances.

“You need to acknowledge that’s the job today, and that’s what differentiates fantastic travel agents from people who just pile it high and sell it cheap.”

’High plateau’

Dame Irene and Woodall-Johnston insist both sales and profit have been strong across Hays IG’s more than 100 members, with the group welcoming 12 new businesses over the past 12 months.

In a nod to the IG conference’s “year of two peaks” theme, coined by Dame Irene at the agency’s retail conference last November, head of Hays IG, Harriet Thompson, congratulated delegates on a peak of their own – the best trading day in its 29-year history in January.

Dame Irene, who has previously been hesitant in pinpointing when this second peak will come, is also now more bullish. “I think it’s going to start in the spring,” she tells TTG.

Ever ambitious, she admits she is “hoping for a high plateau, rather than a peak”. She adds Hays Travel is aware a “significant” proportion of its customer base is yet to travel. “We know people booking in January were booking for July and August,” she says.

“But the pattern from the evidence is people booking six to eight weeks [before travel]. The consideration period has shortened between January and February. Who knows if that is going to continue?"

’Early days’

Woodall-Johnston highlights a focus on April and May thanks to additional tour operator capacity, saying marketing would be key to maximising a second peak.

“We know how many of our customers have got a forward booking. We’ve segmented our database to understand whether we’re targeting these customers in the lates market or further out.”

He points to ongoing email marketing and social media, but reveals Hays Travel will repeat its direct mail initiative during the summer lates market for customers without a late booking, initiated for the first time last year.

“That was really effective, but this year, we’re tailoring it more to audiences – couples or families – so customers can resonate.”