January news

2023 has been a great year for sales to NZ and Australia so far with huge demand and bookings coming in faster than the travel agencies can manage.  Call times and email response times have dropped considerably but are still way behind 2019 standards.  This is due to agencies still being understaffed and also poor response times from NZ/Australian product suppliers who are also understaffed.  Everyone is employing and training staff as fast as possible, but this all takes time.

Travel is not the only industry with a shortage of staff and product so customers paying more than previous levels and accepting a lower standard of product and/or service is unfortunately becoming more normal than rare.  I don’t want to sound negative and as mentioned, everyone is doing all they can to increase staff levels and get them trained up to deliver the standards of service that we expect and want to deliver to our customers.

I attended Vakantiebeurs in Utrecht this month and I will be going to see agents in Scandinavia at the end of the month. Next month we have PATA exchange https://pata.org.uk/event/pata-exchange-2023/ so it will be a great time of catching up with many people that I have not seen for a long time.