Like many of you I’m sure, we’re having a fairly strong peaks at Deben Travel.

What’s struck me though, is that while our sales have remained level with the same period last year – which was a record-breaking January for us – it doesn’t feel as busy.

Now this could be because peaks just hasn’t kicked in fully for us yet, but I have a suspicion it’s more to do with the fact we’ve become stricter with our appointments system, which is now in its second year.

Gone are the days when the shop would be full to bursting point and it'd literally be one after another, after another – and you wouldn't have a wee all day! The appointment system does at least allow you 15 minutes to have a sandwich.

From a sales perspective, we've only seen a positive impact from introducing appointments – which can be booked online or by phone. We don’t charge for them and we do still allow walk-ins, but on occasion we’ll have to ask a customer to wait or come back later as all the team are tied up in appointments.

I think the key thing is those people that make an appointment are generally very serious about booking, and therefore the conversion rate is much higher [than for walk-ins]. It does filter out those people who maybe haven't got strong intentions of booking any time soon.

I also feel we’re able to offer a slightly better service to those who book appointments, as we can do quite a lot of research before the client comes in – and we can even send them an email to tie up loose ends in advance. For example, we can let them know about availability if they’ve made a specific date request, and ask them for alternatives – it gives the customer an opportunity to check with work, or the dog kennels and so on.

There’s also the fact that if I think back to a few years ago when we didn't have appointments, we'd be serving someone and there’d be people waiting, and maybe we wouldn't give those people sitting in front of us the time they needed because we were thinking we had to move things along. That wasn’t optimal for anybody.

If you think about it, there aren't many service industries these days where you can just wander in.

If you're going to a hairdresser’s or having your nails done, you make an appointment.

I really believe appointment systems are the future for travel agencies.