New Blue Bay chief Rowland: 'We're on the acquisition trail'

Private equity firm LDC-backed Blue Bay, a multiple TTG award winner, serves about 15,000 passengers per year, operating “at the value end of luxury”. Known for selling Mexico and the Caribbean, the brand is growing into the Indian Ocean. It sells direct through a subscriber model and through third-party channels Travelzoo, Holiday Pirates and Secret Escapes, and also operates as a tour operator to the 400 agencies within Midcounties.

A big focus for the brand is growing its homeworking arm, which Rowland hopes will expand from 24 to 50-100 homeworkers within two years.

“We’ve got an opportunity to bring onboard selfemployed homeworkers who can sell whatever they want to their own database, but have also got access to all our enquiries for our bespoke, exclusive contracts, and that’s going to be new to the market.

“Many of those in the marketplace who might have shops but can’t afford to continue with the lease are going to probably end up in a homeworking model, and many people with their own Atols who find they can’t renew them will probably end up in a consortium model,” he explains.

“So there’s going to be a big, significant shift in the marketplace to homeworking and consortiums more generally.

“What I’m looking at here is really good agents who do the job properly, at least on a part-time basis.”

He adds: “The more product we deliver, particularly in new destinations, the more opportunity we’ve got for fulfilment. Anything we push out through a third-party channel is exclusive.

“Equally, we offer our products to the PTAs within Co-op as well, so they have access to all of our contracts.

“We’re not worried whether we’re selling all of our stuff B2B or direct to client, or whether we’re selling it within the Co-op family.”

Product growth is also an area of focus for Blue Bay, expanding its contracting team with the addition of Steve Silver and Sam Dowling as product managers.

Rowland admits it may seem an “odd” time to be taking staff on while so many other “great businesses” have made redundancies.

“In a year’s time, we don’t want Blue Bay to just be known for the Caribbean and Mexico,” he says. “We want it to be known as a luxury tour operator with exclusive deals in a much broader context.

“We’ll always invest in the development area too because much of this is around bespoke technology and what we can do with websites – the speed to market.” Blue Bay currently sells 50% online.

“So I think we’ll continue to grow in terms of resourcing generally, but we’ll be cautious,” he concludes.

And Rowland is confident there aren’t wholesale redundancies on the horizon for debt free Blue Bay. “Technically we operate as an agent and we’re still getting paid for what we sell. And right now we’re selling enough to pay the bills.”

Rowland adds Blue Bay is looking to become better known among the trade.

“Our product is exclusive in terms of use of the Atol licence, but we have Blue Bay Hotels as an Abta member in its own right, therefore we will end up with our hotel contracts available for agents using other tour operators throughout the UK.”