Selling Travel in the U.K.

Build it and they will come. That’s not quite how Ken McNab describes his own travel business in Edinburgh, Scotland, but that’s how he works. Create a travel product that buyers can’t find anywhere else and they will pay your price without a quibble. Your price, not the bargain price they found online, because the product doesn’t exist online.

As part of our coverage of travel sellers outside of the U.S., Travel Market Report spoke with McNab about key trends and developments in the U.K.’s travel seller community. McNab is an agency owner and chair of the U.K. chapter of the American Society of Travel Agents.

Our biggest challenge has been getting suppliers to understand that we are part of the distribution chain. It’s like having the lunatics running the asylum. If you look at airlines, they lost something like $12 billion last year. These are the guys who look to travel agents to protect and grow the business, yet they say we are not entitled to a commission. That has spurred consolidation. A number of airlines have had to be absorbed, some liquidated. We used to have eight major package tour supplies. They consolidated down to four and those four ate each other up so that now we have two, Thomas Cook and TUI. It is happening in travel agencies, too.

But when the phoenix dies, something new arises from the ashes. There are a number of smaller tour operators starting out and they are quite prepared to negotiate. Operators that have been started by airlines like Virgin Holidays are keen for the market. They are giving better margins, better commission levels, and a more attractive product. Those are the guys who are growing well.

Good agents are looking at the scope of their sales. They are taking the package holiday and also selling a ticket to the car park or an airport transfer, selling a lounge pass for the airport, selling an upgrade. Airlines unbundling their product is a huge opportunity. The customer on an airline website has no idea how much that journey is going to cost by the time all the fees get added on. We can come in and say “no worries, we’ll take care of it.” Travelers respond to an offer they can’t get anywhere else.

American agencies tend to have a broader platform from which they work. U.K. agencies tend to break down into specific sectors - leisure, business, corporate, meetings, and so on. In the U.S., there are still a lot of ma and pa agencies, one office, a few people working together. That is dying in the U.K. We have a lot more home workers and they are starting to eat into the marketplace. The bigger organizations tend to recruit experienced retail people and train them up in travel. Smaller organizations bring home workers in as a franchise, charge them a fee, and turn them loose on the unsuspecting public. People tend to forget that a franchise is there for the franchiser to make a buck, not for the franchisee.

Our professional knowledge is our advantage. Few people in Scotland have a reason to look at Aer Lingus in Ireland. But Aer Lingus is offering £159 return tickets from Dublin to New York, something in the region of $300, including taxes. British Air and Virgin and Delta will not match that. So I can sell a £50 ticket to Dublin and get somebody into the USA for £250 including taxes, which is well below market. I can sell that with a good booking fee, insurance, and passenger protection and still provide very good value. It’s just not something people know to go out and do themselves. The objective is to produce and sell a product that is seamless to the customer.

 We have survived very well selling quality service. We are doing exceedingly well this year because we are looking for what we know versus what the average consumer can find easily on the Internet. We can get specialist fares, we can use consolidators, we can tap into the top end of the market to build top quality products at better prices than if people tried to do it themselves.


People will have to become more professional in their approach to the business. Those who believe that you can open the door and customers will walk in off the street and buy something off the shelf have a danger. The people who are not willing to change and move forward with the industry need to look at taking their retirement packet and moving out to do something else.

The thing an agency can do is to start bundling up different components to sell a total product, home-to-destination-to-home. The customer would have to go to eight or nine websites to bring all those elements together. One way forward is to create your own package and build in a reasonable margin. There are two things you must do along the way: You must create insurance to protect the customer in case any component goes wrong. And if it’s got your name on it, it’s got to be something that you can sing and dance about without any reservation or hesitation.

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