TravelMole Secret Agent – single supplements are getting me down
Thursday, 08 May, 2009
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TravelMole’s Secret Agent is back from her travels with a bee in her bonnet about the way the industry caters for solo travellers
It’s been so long since l last wrote….and so much has happened.
I’ve been to India and while I’ve been away we’ve had travel companies still failing, riots in Bangkok, swine flu and O’Leary still being, well, O’Leary. Nothing changes then!
It’s amazing how resilient we are in the travel trade. There is always something being thrown at us to wear us down, but we always bounce back.
I suppose the big thing at the moment is swine flu.
I have got to admit l have extremely lucky and not had any of my customers affected.
Let’s hope this goes away as quickly as it came. It will be interesting to see how cheap Mexico will be after it all dies down….could be some bumper bargains for Mexico later this year.
But my biggest gripe at the moment is the poor old single traveller.
I have a regular customer that l book year on year and we hit the same problem every time: single room supplements and lack of single rooms. It is so unfair.
Over the last few years we have tended to stick to Olympic Holidays as they are very good with low single supplements but, most importantly, they seem to be very willing to offer a room for sole occupancy.
But we have now exhausted the Greek Isles and Cyprus and she wants to experience more.
We have been recently looking at late deals and we had found some absolute bargains to Italy which is somewhere she wanted to explore more of.
The problem that jumped out straight away was the massive lack of single rooms, and when we did find one, it had an extortionate single supplement.
Now call me simple, but rather than leave a room unsold, would it not be better to sell it to a single, with a supplement (preferable a small supplement)? Makes good business sense to me.
So what did we end up doing? Well she is reluctantly on her way back to Crete with Olympic.
Phil Davies
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