Neilson agrees to pay commission on agent’s ‘direct-only’ booking
Neilson has agreed to pay commission to a travel agent who unwittingly booked a regular client into a hotel that is now part of the operator’s direct-sell portfolio.
The operator said the incident was a one-off mistake that had been made by an inexperienced member of its reservations team.
As reported on TravelMole’s Friday morning newswire, Louise Vernon, senior travel consultant at Omega Travel in Cheshire, made the £4,000 booking for her client on Tuesday.
On Thursday, she was told the Neilson reservation agent made a mistake and should not have confirmed the booking because the property, the Hotel Aalborg in Les Deux Alpes, is now part of Neilson’s direct-only product range.
Neilson announced in March last year that, for its 2017/18 Mountain Collection range would only be available as direct-sell, not through the trade. Other products in its portfolio can still be sold through agents.
Louise said she was unaware the property had become direct-sell only and, as this is the eighth year in a row she has booked this particular hotel for her client, she didn’t check the brochure.
She was told the 10% commission she had expected to get would not be paid and, despite several phone calls to Neilson’s trade department, the operator would not budge. This prompted her to post on the Travel Gossip Facebook site to say she’d binned all Neilson’s brochures.
A spokeswoman for Neilson said the operator had looked into the booking and managing director David Taylor said he was very sorry for the confusion and had authorised the commission to be paid.
Neilson explained only a third of its ski product is direct-sell and the rest is still available for agents to book. The proportion of direct-sell product has not increased since the announcement was made in March last year and it has separate agents’ brochures that do not include the direct-sell properties.
In addition, Neilson said the whole of its beach product is still available for agents to sell.
Neilson head of brand Dean Robinson added: "We are very sorry Louise found herself in this unfortunate situation, we had hoped we had communicated the changes extensively when we announced them last year.
"We very much value our travel agent partners. There is still two-thirds of our ski product that is commissionable plus all our 10 summer beach clubs."
Louise said Neilson’s change of heart is ‘great news’.
But she added: "I don’t think it should have gone this far. This won’t make up for the shoddy treatment from Neilson, but I am very happy not to have lost the commission."
Lisa
Lisa joined Travel Weekly nearly 25 years ago as technology reporter and then sailed around the world for a couple of years as cruise correspondent, before becoming deputy editor. Now freelance, Lisa writes for various print and web publications, edits Corporate Traveller’s client magazine, Gateway, and works on the acclaimed Remembering Wildlife series of photography books, which raise awareness of nature’s most at-risk species and helps to fund their protection.
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