Speaking during TTG’s Agenda 2022 seminar on Tuesday (1 February), managing director Simon Applebaum said: “I think we need 100 heads by next peaks just on Gold Medal. A lot will go into our sales centre because we expect capacity to continue to ramp up.
"We’re asking a lot of our agents through peaks, so we need more bodies. We want a mix of really experienced travel people, but also people from different backgrounds and give them a brilliant education.”
Applebaum said there were a couple of outstanding vacancies for February’s intake, adding recruitment would continue “every month for the rest of the year”. Vacancies are business-wide, and will aim to ready Gold Medal for growth, he said.
TTG 30 Under 30 alumnus Applebaum admitted call wait times mid-January ran to “15-20 minutes on sales and 30-40 minutes on after sales”, although he stressed these times had since diminished.
New vacancies include a role with dedicated oversight for homeworkers, whom Applebaum predicted would overtake traditional retailers because asking people to work “heavily rostered shifts in retail outlets” would be challenging for recruiters.
This, he said, meant Gold Medal would have to change. “We’re looking at our opening times and how we engage on social media because agents contact us in slightly different ways, be it through Twitter or other channels, at odd hours, and we need to react.”
TTG+ members can now watch the first Agenda 2022 seminar of the year on demand here; the event featured exclusive consumer and trade research from PwC, as well as key tips and advice to make the most of peaks. Members can also read the full PwC-TTG "Is travel taking off again report" here.
He said bookings were growing “week after week after week”. “Every week brings a new wave of optimism. We’re having to temper that because we’ve been there before, but it feels fantastic. The narrative from our agent partners feels better and better.”
Sales were not “quite where 2019 was”, said Applebaum, but he added Middle East, Indian Ocean and the US were “really strong”. However, key destinations like Australia and Thailand “are just not there and we don’t expect them to be until later this year”.
Pandemic sales have been very late or long ahead, he said, but booking patterns had normalised in January, with “really strong” April sales and Easter “very promising”. “I think lates will be strong, I think people will be adding capacity. We’ll see people making last-minute decisions throughout the year.”
Customers are travelling for longer and spending more, he said, with a definite trend towards experiences over material purchases. “We don’t need flatter, bigger TVs, we’ve hit the zenith on that," he said.
"What we’ve seen from the pandemic and what we’ll see even more strongly coming out of it is travel and experience as essential to the human condition. That’ll be a trend that will grow on and on. It’s absolutely not about ‘we’ve had two years of lockdown, once we get a holiday out the system, we’ll be back to normal’.”
The pandemic will leave a lasting, positive effect on the industry, he predicted. “I think we’ll see travel advisors do really, really well in the next year or two. The disruption has been fantastic reputationally.
“There will be less inclination from the industry to race to the bottom, because we’ve seen the real cost of servicing a booking and what that potentially looks like if you have disruption; so I think everybody will be a bit smarter about margin. That’s a welcome change.
“In my time, too much has been driven by cost wars and trying to get to that bottom of the barrel. Let’s hold the value in what we do and not trash it.”
Applebaum said fam trips would soon resume. “We have a pot of cash we’ll be using to go back out into the world to provide fam trips to our partners. Watch this space.”
He said he also wanted to meet more agents in the coming months, and urged them to invite him to visit.
He added there were “at least six, maybe more” opportunities for new products. He said nothing would be rushed to market, but pledged: “Next year we want to be bullish and grow and come out fighting.”
