Here’s what he had to say:

Like everyone at Thomas Cook, my team – Commercial Sales & Relations - is working to support and help deliver the group’s strategy for profitable growth. This is involves improving our offer by strengthening our portfolio of own brand hotels such as Sunprime, Sentido and Casa Cook.

To maximise our investment, we believe the thousands of independent agents across the country will play an important role.  This is a key area of focus for my team led by Audrey Brooks-Wiggins, head of trade partnerships.

Our partnerships with other businesses collectively form the largest part of the Commercial Sales & Relations function (formerly Merchandising), which also covers Supplier and Cruise Partnerships.

Throughout Thomas Cook – in store, online or call centres, we are helping customers better understand our products. Working closely with the independent sector means our footprint can be stronger still as we look to grow sales.

What Thomas Cook shares with the independent is the understanding that customers value the expertise offered face-to-face by well-trained, knowledgeable professionals. 

When I joined Thomas Cook just over a year ago one of my first tasks was to develop relationships with the independent agency sector.  We believe there is a big opportunity to do more together.

We have spent time speaking to independent agents to understand how they would like to work with us. One way was to build a longer-term commitment. We quickly identified key agent partners and in some cases agreed new multi-year contracts. Committing to a longer contract means both Thomas Cook and the agent are focused on creating a loyal customer, not a quick sale, allowing us to see the benefit of our investment in customer service. We hope to secure more long-term contracts.

We also aim to properly incentivise agents to sell Thomas Cook holidays. Our goal is to create holiday experiences that our own staff are proud to sell and recommend to their family and friends.  We want independent agents to feel the same. 

To enable this we have made changes to improve what we do both in resort and out.  This includes better quality tracking, embedding net promoter score as a key metric, taking out poor performing hotels, more training for staff and dedicated quality managers for the most important hotels. Our 24-hour satisfaction promise has proved a great success.

Independent agents can be assured that if they recommend an own brand Thomas Cook hotel, their valued clients will receive outstanding service.

We plan to be in regular communication with independent agents, explaining our changing and improving product. Audrey and her team are travelling the country to better understand their needs. We believe in creating solutions which are fit for purpose rather than a one-size-fits-all policy. 

These are exciting times. As we said in our recent pre-close trading update, sales to our own-brand hotels have continued to increase while customer satisfaction is significantly up across all our markets, especially in those hotels. We are looking forward to doing even better.