by Simon on August 19, 2010
Apologies for the silence around here in recent weeks. It’s been a busy summer and time has not really been on my side as far as Travel Shorthand has been concerned. However, things should get back to normal in September.
Amidst the chaos, I have been able to catch a few episodes of The Secret Tourist which is the BBC’s latest attempt to scare the crap out of anyone going on holiday this summer.
If you took this programme too seriously you wouldn’t venture out of your hotel room for fear of getting ripped off by the taxi driver and then conned by the restaurant or shop or whoever you may visit. Except you shouldn’t stay in your hotel because you’ll probably catch something off the pool or your bed. And don’t even think about doing anything active.
I don’t really have a problem with the tremendously earnest Carole Machin finding everything so alarming. The section of the show that is slightly more problematic is the undercover family that visits an underperforming hotel. The researchers look for a poorly rated hotel on Trip Advisor and send a family over to look for all the bad bits and unsurprisingly they find it to be an underperforming hotel.
Which is all fine, but why show this in July and August? It’s hardly prime booking season and anyone who has a stay booked at one of the featured hotels is going to find it hard to switch to anything else. I’m sure a few tour operators have received calls from worried travellers as a result of this section, but this far into the season they will be limited in what they can do.
Tackling a poor hotel in early to mid season is also unlikely to yield much in the way of results. The underperforming staff will all be firmly entrenched for the season and the hapless manager will blunder his way through to the end. At least it shows what the operations staff of tour operators are up against when they try to get hotels to make improvements.
And this is the interesting thing about the show; although The Secret Tourist is hardly a good thing for the UK travel industry, it does go easy on it. The programme goes straight to the source and refrains from naming any tour operators that sell the hotels featured.
Previous BBC consumer looks at travel such as That’s Life and Watchdog would have hauled some hapless tour operator into the studio to ask why a hotel it features is so poor. Now the focus is on the people running the hotels, which is how it should be.
Unfortunately, the programme highlights how little some of these hotels care and if a tour operator cuts them from their programme they’re generally confident that they’ll find another one to take the rooms. That’s how it works in such a price-driven market. But with so many bargain tour operators going to the wall at the moment it might not be so easy.
Many words have been written already about The Times paywall and there’s no point in trying to look at the implications for the media when people like David Hepworth do it so well. But what are the implications for travel sections?
At least Hepworth coughed up his pound to take a look at what they had to offer. I took one look from a travel point of view and thought “you want me to pay £1 for that?” There’s little in the way of trailers or anything to tempt you into the travel section. On a Sunday, the online edition at least tells you what is in the travel section, during the week, it doesn’t even do that.
The Times may argue that if you buy the paper edition you cannot see what is inside. But if I buy the paper edition of the Times I will generally spend a fair amount of time reading it. Online, like many people, I’ll spend twenty minutes here or there and it’s a snack not a feast. For me to pay for the snack I want to know what I’m going to get.
Does the travel section of a newspaper appear online as well as the rest of the paper? I’m not sure. I have spoken before about the relationship travel editors have with travel companies and although, in my experience, most travel companies are more interested in the print edition, there’s no denying that the online copy provides greater longevity for a piece and is useful if people are searching for something specific.
However, travel pieces, particularly in The Times, can be quite long and I’ll only generally read them if they are writing about a destination, or by someone that is of interest to me. So why doesn’t The Times offer more of a preview of its online content? I really don’t know, if you do please let me know. As it stands, I’m not tempted to pay only to find stories about cruises, or other areas of travel that are of little interest to me.
I wish The Times all the best, I really hope it works for the sake of journalists everywhere. But blindly expecting everyone to pay seems slightly arrogant to me. I’m afraid that if they want me to pay to access the travel section they’re going to have to sell it to me and they’re just not doing that at the moment.
by Simon on June 15, 2010
If there is one job where the returns seem to be forever diminishing, it’s that of the travel rep. Not only is the role tougher than ever, it is just as miserably paid and add to that the remote possibility of finding yourself in court and you have to ask yourself why anyone would bother.
Predominantly, there are two reasons why the likes of Thomas Cook and Tui still have plenty of applicants for their seasonal roles; people want a good time or they want to escape from something (dull job, failed relationship, parents). Companies can only really play on one of these when recruiting, and the challenge is how to attract people who want the lifestyle, but are willing to put a shift in.
Unsurprisingly, it is hard to find any companies who advertise what they pay their staff. The wages have always been low, but in the past there were always ways to improve them. When I started my first ski season the stories of scams were legendary. I was told of one rep who, amongst other things, retrieved the old lift passes at the end of each week and spent Friday nights breaking the seals and replacing the photos with Saturday’s arrivals. He then used the £30K he’d made at the end of the season to buy a house. Whether this is true or not, there’s no denying most supervisors were happy to turn a blind eye as long as targets were met.
You could always tell how honest your predecessor was when you visited suppliers at the start of the season and they would give you a nod and a wink. These days (nearly) all that has been put paid to by technology and tighter auditing. Everyone is working more “professionally” these days, and this can be seen in the job titles. Staff are called Customer Service Executives or Resort Managers and it does seem a lot of the fun has been taken from the role.
There’s now more properties covered by fewer staff and an emphasis on more sales for smaller returns. Times are tougher all round and it’s less common these days to see reps get the free drinks in bars that were ubiquitous not so long ago. Add to that a weaker pound and the “beer money” doesn’t get you as much beer as it used to.
In terms of the role, travellers are so much more savvy these days that it’s inevitable that sales and problem solving take more prominence than assistance. In many cases people will be able to consult their iphone just as easily as get an answer from a rep.
It’s easy to sound like an old man saying “it’s not like it was in my day” and I would struggle to recommend it to anyone as something to do, but there will still be a long queue of people willing to take the plunge.
Photo by Vlokkie
