Kuoni aims to minimise redundancies in trade sales shake-up
Kuoni is consulting with trade sales staff in its Dorking head office after deciding to shake up the way it deals with agents.
The operator has decided to scale down its trade sales call centre so it only deals with calls from key accounts and agent partners, and will call this a ‘Partner Service Hub’.
Calls from smaller, independent agents will instead be filtered out to one of its 40 stores across the UK, to be dealt with by one of its ‘Personal Travel Experts’.
The operator believes this would be a better way to deal with the challenge of peaks and troughs in demand, rather than staffing a trade-only call centre.
However, it said independent agents would still be supported by a central trade operations team, responsible for post-booking and all administrative support.
"As a result of this proposal we have today advised all those affected in trade sales that we will begin a consultation period with a view to re-organising our trade support," said managing director Derek Jones yesterday.
"We will be discussing the proposed structure and roles with everyone involved and it’s our aim to retain the knowledge and experience we have to ensure we continue to deliver excellent service consistently for our travel agent partners."
A spokeswoman for the company could not confirm how many people will be affected by the shake-up, but said the aim is to retain skills and talent and ‘minimise redundancies’.
She said the number of jobs likely to be at risk will be in single figures.
Katie Daniels and Lucy Ellingham are to stay with the company.
Meanwhile, Kuoni has promoted head of direct sales Helen Roberts to the position of sales director.
In this new role, she will also take on responsibility for trade sales and will continue to report into Jones.
The move comes after head of trade sales Amanda Darrington left Kuoni to join Funway Holidays this month after seven years with Kuoni.
The spokeswoman said Darrington’s departure was not connected to the proposed skake-up.
Kuoni also confirmed that it was in the final stages of recruiting for a new position of national sales manager, who will report into Roberts and will develop relationships with travel agents.
Bev
Editor in chief Bev Fearis has been a travel journalist for 25 years. She started her career at Travel Weekly, where she became deputy news editor, before joining Business Traveller as deputy editor and launching the magazine’s website. She has also written travel features, news and expert comment for the Guardian, Observer, Times, Telegraph, Boundless and other consumer titles and was named one of the top 50 UK travel journalists by the Press Gazette.
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