It was an event no-one expected and no-one believed would ever happen. Within days, airports around the UK fell eerily silent At Bournemouth airport, next to our office, British Airways parked aircraft worth hundreds of millions of pounds, wheels chocked and engines covered, not knowing when they would fly again.
Overnight, we went from an industry with a refund rate of less than 1% to one with a 99% cancellation rate. As an industry, we simply weren’t geared up to cope. Over the past two years, travel has lost a lot of good people to other sectors. A lot of that expertise and experience may never return. Most operators and airlines took advantage of the furlough scheme for survival, which meant it became difficult for those left to deal with refunds and rebookings as there was no-one to talk to.
Travel sellers, though, couldn’t just shut their doors and furlough staff, they had to keep them working, despite the lack of income from new sales. It was like a restaurant having to refund every meal it served for the past year. The industry was continually being hit with new rule changes, which always seemed to be announced by government in the evening or at the weekend – those times when staff had gone home.
Travel is now seeing, or is about to see, the biggest comeback ever as more and more customers want to travel. This is an exciting time to be in travel. But our industry also has a two-year black hole in its earnings. We need to scale up to support this sudden growth but, as we don’t get paid until clients travel, many smaller companies are still suffering from a lack of cashflow. We feel for those companies with this problem.
The NJT story
NJT started the day before 9/11, and has seen everything since then. The travel industry is very resilient. We all love to travel and that will never change. When foreign secretary Dominic Raab made the announcement halting all non-essential travel, we had more than 20 of our team away skiing in Canada, oblivious to the events unfolding in the world.
At home, we could see what was happening and started moving our teams to work from home ahead of the lockdowns. Yet everyone thought we would be back in the office within a few weeks. As a business, we didn’t know how long we would need to survive like this. We created a new business plan based on us having no income until September thinking that by then, it would all be over. How wrong we were.
Initially, before the furlough scheme was announced, our corporate team volunteered to significantly reduce their salaries to help the business. We will always remain grateful to these unsung heroes. Once the scheme was announced, we furloughed some non-frontline members of our team, but soon opted to keep the majority of them working – and on full pay – because we recognised the work was not slowing and customers needed to be able to get through to us. Customer service was our top priority then, and continues to be.
As a franchise business, our customers are our travel consultants and their clients – and our travel consultants were hurting badly as they lost their income. We set up hardship funds to help them as best we could. We worked with other businesses to win call centre support work for more than 200 of our travel consultants, providing them income during this time. We deferred all credit card fees for new bookings and rebookings to help our travel consultants’ cash flow.
Not only did we have to cancel holidays, we’d already paid out commission for these holidays to our consultants. To help them, we didn’t ask for this back straightaway. In fact, we’ve taken up to two years to recover much of this money. We absorbed refund costs and credit card fees, even though the credit card companies were charging us.
As it was such a dark time for both our team and our consultants, we started holding daily Facebook Live calls and interactive sessions to keep them engaged and to offer some routine. We created training programmes with our in-house training team and suppliers to help use the downtime to educate and upskill our consultants, and keep them focused. We brought in specialists such as life coaches and mind and body coaches. We continued to find ways to keep our travel consultants engaged and give them reasons to keep engaging with their customers and anyone who needed help.
During lockdowns, we found customers were grateful to their consultants for their personal touch; talking about potential holidays provided a ray of light and a focus for when the lockdown and travel restrictions would end.
We invested heavily in technology to help our consultants manage their bookings, cancellations and refunds better, and to provide better customer experience as existing industry platforms weren’t designed for this. We also created our key trade partner programme in the middle of the pandemic to help our trade partners recover with our support.
During the pandemic, more than 150 new franchisees joined our business because they knew the bounce back was going to be huge. We recruited new team members into the business at a time when people were laying off staff.
We proved relationships and constant communication – of good and bad news – absolutely pays off. And that by continuing to support and value our customers, we would get through this pandemic together and come out the other side.
So where are we now?
The elastic band that has been pulled back for two years has now been released. We’re breaking records nearly every day. Not Just Travel’s sales in February 2022 were up by 230% compared with the same month in 2021, 433% on 2020 and 193% on 2019.
More than 85% of bookings are currently for this year because people want to travel. At the same time, we’ve never had so many advance bookings as clients plan ahead. Travellers are eager and excited to be able to plan and then actually travel again.
Average booking values have increased by more than £1,000 compared with pre-pandemic bookings. As a result, we’re expanding our team and have committed more than £1 million extra to recruitment.
So how do we celebrate this bittersweet anniversary? We are rejoicing in this week’s news that all travel restrictions and rules soon to be removed, while face coverings will no longer be required in many travel hubs.
We have proven our resilience through the darkest of times. Now let’s celebrate a brighter future.
Steve Witt is one of the co-founders of Not Just Travel.
