‘Don’t let the good times lull you into complacency’

Tomorrow, the Abacus International Conference 2007 kicks off in Kota Kinabalu, Sabah. TravelMole Asia talks to Brett Henry, Vice President, Agency Marketing Division, Abacus International, ahead of the pow-wow.

Q: How has the year been so far for Abacus? Spectacular or average?

Abacus has enjoyed very strong growth in its bookings this year. Our actual growth in FIT bookings YTD July 2007 was 11%, well ahead of the 6% growth we were targeting.

Q: What are the reasons for the strong performance?

The growth was shared across North Asia (with actual bookings 12% ahead of the same period last year) and South Asia (with actual bookings 10%) ahead of the same period last year).

Particularly strong performers were South Korea (+23%, Taiwan (+13%), Philippines (+29%, Bangladesh (+50%), Pakistan (+20%), Thailand (+12%).

The travel market as a whole is growing but we picked up a strong share of this growth through the strength of our network of NMC (National Marketing Companies) in 24 markets, our ongoing partnership with travel agencies and keeping up the investment in new solutions such as Abacus SmartPrice introduced this year.

Q: Given that it’s such good times, are you concerned that this could lull agents into further complacency – thinking, hey, why do I have to change when things are going so well?

We do see that risk that travel agents could be complacent and pursue easy growth, rather than positioning themselves for the long haul in a market with many structural changes and technological disruptions. With events such as our AIC, we are determined to keep our partner agencies focused on the bigger picture and help them evolve their businesses into higher value areas.

Q: How do you think travel agents need to change? Cite three top trends or issues.

The smartest agencies will specialise, invest in developing their people and brands and use tools such as CRM (customer relationship management) to actively mine their customer base and generate new business.

Travel agents will move ever more towards being true ‘travel consultants’ and advocates for the traveler for which they can justify better margin.

The three top trends: the rise of online travel distribution, the need to specialise in high value areas (eg education travel, medical travel, grey travel, green travel) and one emerging trend that we are going to hear and see a lot more about is the sustainability issue.

Q: Companies like Abacus are caught in that zone – between wanting to facilitate change and bringing your customers along and yet staying mindful of the realities and current issues. How do you balance that? How do you move into the future when you have to also get stuck in the present?

It’s more an issue of constant innovation and investment to seek to continually improve our strategic position within the industry and ensure we continue to provide value to our travel agency and airline partners.

It is a balancing act – ensuring that our solutions, technologically speaking, do not get ahead of the capabilities of our travel agency partners, and the intermediatory networks which vary widely across Asia’s diverse countries, yet striving to keep up with the play and bring the industry with us.

Q: What will the future travel agency look like?

The future is bright and exciting as Asia’s populations grow wealthier and reach out to the world. People love to travel and they need to travel, and will constantly seek out the easiest and most secure way to make it happen. We see a continuing role for the travel agents and GDS in that – given the complexities of travel in Asia. As a market, we will be harder to commoditise than the highly mature, and to a degree, homogenised markets of North America and Europe.

As for the travel agency of the future, the best answer for that will be your attendance at the AIC conference – we’ll be taking time to recognise some of the best, smartest emerging travel agency – and trialing a new Virtual Travel Agency set up in partnership with a Singapore agency. The future will see the successful agencies moving very much into specialised markets, adding value through the depth of their knowledge and quality of their relationships as they become the traveller’s advocate.