Throughout months of lockdown, Wendy Wu Tours hosted more than 30 "high-performance" parties, with up to 800 registering for each event.
Speaking at the 2021 ITT Conference onboard MSC Virtuosa on Monday (13 September), Wu said each party made the operator around £800,000. "It was amazing," she said. "Our customers loved it, and our team loved it. It showed we were making a difference."
Wu also revealed a quarter of the bookings were made by new customers, with some 10% not having heard of Wendy Wu Tours just ten days before the event took place.
Wu also hailed agents for their reaction to the onset of Covid. "We saw a lot of support from our travel agent partners when the pandemic hit in January and February 2020," she said. "We were one of the companies hit with China and Japan being locked down early on – I was so touched.
"At the start of 2021, we set up three goals. Galvanise the customers, continue to engage with trade, and continue to sharpen and strengthen our abilities as individuals, a team, as a business and as a whole."
During the pandemic, the operator tapped into the domestic market by launching a Scotland itinerary along with a "Japanese cultural treasure trail" in London.
"Our expertise is in Japan and China so we will absolutely go back," said Wu, confidently. "Vietnam, central Asia, Indian, that’s our core market. We will go deeper, and become more and more specialised in it.
"We will use the touring expertise to grow and next year we will look to tap into the European tour because we don’t know when major destinations will open."
