Find out how booking habits have changed this year, making it easier to get your business started fast.
As we enter the second quarter of the year, it’s typically the end of the traditional Peaks season.
Peaks is when you see all the holiday sales ads on TV, as people get their holidays booked for the rest of the year. As part of your business, you’ll get ready-made promotions about it from our marketing team and brand ambassador Daley Thompson.
But, as the world adjusts to dealing with Covid, those old patterns aren’t necessarily repeating themselves this year.
The first quarter has been hugely successful for travel agents, with more new & first-time customers than before. People are also spending more per holiday on average than in previous years.
A big trend right now is that people are getting away soon after making their booking.
People have changed their booking habits
Because the flight and hotel inventory simply wasn’t there to be secured, you could rarely book over a year ahead of travel in the past.
Now, bookings already being made right into 2024.
Yet that’s not even half the picture.
More people are also booking much closer to their travel dates, thanks to the recent travel rules & restrictions being relaxed.
In the last month, we saw that almost three quarters of bookings were due to leave soon.
- 15% of people were booking for right at the end of the winter 21/22 season
- 20% were booking to travel in April and May
- 55% of holidays booked were to depart summer 2022.
People are booking all sorts of destinations for quick holidays
We’ve seen that customers are making last-minute decisions about grabbing a quick break.
Short-haul destinations remain ever-popular, with Spain top of the list for the earliest departures, including the mainland plus the Balearic and Canary islands.
Greece, Cyprus, Turkey and the US follow closely as we head into July, August and September.
Further afield destinations are also proving to be very lucrative for travel agents right now.
The Maldives has an average booking value of over £8,000, with Mauritius being not far behind at £6,000 a time.
Booking values can be more than you expect
The right customers love using travel agents for service, knowledge, trust and peace of mind that someone is there to look after them.
We’ll teach you how to find those people. And we’ll also show you how to find customers that want to spend on amazing trips.
In the past few weeks alone, we’ve seen bookings for:
- £143k on a luxury trip to Antigua
- £122k for 40+ people to South Africa
- £140k to Dubai for a small group
- £90k on a single cruise
- £65k to Turkey for over 100 passengers
And there are lots of recent bookings for £10k and above, including:
- £35k to Thailand
- £32k to Greece
- £28k to Italy
We’ve even had a £20,000+ booking to Antarctica!
These bookings can make you huge commissions all in one go. And we’ll show you how to secure them.
You could be trained and providing holidays by May
As soon as you finish your induction training, your business is set-up and ready to go. That means you could be making bookings the same day – like Ami. She made her first booking as soon as training finished and then made over £75k in sales in her first two weeks.
