G Adv biggest month yet

G ADVENTURES recorded its biggest month of sales in Australia in Jan, with further growth anticipated, founder Bruce Poon Tip told Travel Daily.

“We haven’t seen a flattening out with coronavirus,” he said, adding that “we’ve seen our business flourish over the last quarter”.

Poon Tip said the company had an incredible Dec and doubledigit growth in Jan, and this month’s numbers so far had been “very solid” in the region.

“We feel people in this region are having no hesitations booking travel for the summer,” he said, but noted G Adventures had been affected by the outbreak, having cancelled all of its trips to China, Korea and Iran until the end of Apr.

“There’s been a bit of unstableness in terms of the booking patterns, because people are in a wait-and-see mentality.”

Poon Tip suggested the company’s travellers were less deterred by the outbreak because “people who do adventure travel are more committed to travelling, I think they just change destinations.

“We’ve gone through Ebola, we’ve gone through SARS, we’ve gone through Zika, we’ve gone through tsunamis and we’ve grown by double digits in all of those years,” he said.

Poon Tip said the company was following the advice of the World

Health Organization and would monitor the situation for the next two weeks before making a decision on its tours scheduled to operate in China, Korea and Iran beyond the end of Apr.

“It’s something that we have to take very seriously and monitor, but at the same time, it’s our job as the travel industry to be the calming voice through all this hysteria,” he said.