TravelMole Guest Comment: All the signs were there, says Turkey rival
Akin Koc, managing director, Anatolian Sky Holidays, says agents should learn a lesson from the collapse of Goldtrail.
“The collapse of Goldtrail should be a salutary lesson to the trade; a cheap holiday is not a good value holiday. Goldtrail were paying less than £3 per person per day including breakfast for accommodation in Turkey.
All the signs were there. We know agents were getting a high volume of complaints about the company, but still booked them. They were using budget carriers which did not have good reputations, and one occasion complaints were so high that they were featured on BBC’s Watchdog last year.
Yet they carried 250,000 people last year and probably the same in 2010. We have seen
all this before with cheap operators to Turkey such as Excel Airways and Holidays and Scot Travel, which went bust earlier in the year.
I do hope agents will start to think again about booking the cheapest option and asking themselves if its actually value for money.
During the recent ash crisis for example many agents have a lot of trouble with bookings made via bed banks, but those who booked using established tour operators like ourselves had everything sorted out for them.
Anatolian Sky Holidays has spent 21 years as specialist to Turkey building up a good reputation for the country and helping it to become the mainstream destination it now is.
By operating on paper thin margins companies like
Gold Trail are doing the development of tourism to Turkey, and our industry, no favours. I hope some lessons have been learned."
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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