Flexibility has become part of travel – let’s hope it stays that way

Tour operators should retain new-found booking freedoms and enhanced customer service, says Nick Trend

Necessity is the mother of invention, and this has certainly been the case when it comes to the response of travel companies to the pandemic. Simply in order to survive, operators, airlines and agents have had to make fundamental changes to the way they work – altering their programmes at incredibly short notice, dealing with huge numbers of cancellations and refunds, and tearing up booking conditions. But have those changes brought advantages? Will they be permanent? And what will they mean to the consumer?

Tui – which is Europe’s biggest holiday company, and supplies about six million overseas package holidays to British travellers each year – is currently thinking about exactly these issues. According to the company’s UK managing director, Andrew Flintham, the biggest change has been the introduction of far greater flexibility – the freedom to make changes to our holidays if and when we want. After decades of strict booking conditions with incredibly restrictive terms and very hefty cancellation and alteration penalties, suddenly the power-balance shifted.

The pandemic was causing so much uncertainty that tour operators knew they would have to let us change, or even cancel, our holidays without charge – or we simply wouldn’t book.

That also meant rapid technological adaptations. Under the old system, the resources required to change large numbers of holidays were huge. To implement the policy, Tui had to open up part of its reservation system to its customers so they could make the changes themselves (instead of having to ask someone at the company to do it for them).

Flintham also says he recognised that, in a time of stress, customers needed to be able to communicate easily with the company. The general trend in recent years – as we all know to our cost – is for customer services to be heavily degraded and replaced with bots and Q&As. Tui says it took a different course during the pandemic, transforming staff who had been working at some of its defunct high street travel agents into customer service agents.

As an outsider, it’s hard to evaluate the success of this move, but if it really does mean it is easier to speak to a real person, I’m sure that will start to show up in its own customer satisfaction ratings.

But will these new-found freedoms and enhanced customer service endure? On the question of flexibility, Andrew Flintham was wary of committing beyond the immediate imperatives of the pandemic, but it is not something which has been ruled out.

Of course, there may be advantages for operators as well as customers. For example, some might decide they want to upgrade or extend their holidays. If there is availability, it would seem foolish for the operator to turn its nose up at the extra revenue. Even if they want to switch to a later – unsold – date, is that such a terrible problem? Surely prices can be adjusted to reflect any risk that the operator might lose out. The old booking regime suddenly seems oldfashioned and punitive.

But when looking forward, we should also remember one of the enduring advantages that package holidays have continued to offer during the pandemic (despite the early issues with unpaid refunds). If you book a package, you have far more rights if things go wrong. And if your holiday has to be rescheduled, it won’t be you trying to re-book flights and accommodation, but the operator. And perhaps most crucially of all, you also have financial protection if the operator goes out of business before or during your trip.

Form a huddle: book a package holiday and, if things go wrong, the operator will sort it out