London based Major Travel announced at the ITAA conference in Almería that it is expanding its B2B operations into Ireland, extending 50 years of service to travel agents with a focus on agent empowerment and support.
The company is dedicated to providing agent-focused tools and technology, including a new platform called Major Go, enabling agents to manage bookings for varied travel options easily.
Major Travel emphasizes competitive pricing and bespoke support through its expert team and enhanced live chat services, allowing agents to thrive against direct sell operators.
The company plans to introduce a new cruise booking platform and has undergone significant product innovations, affirming its commitment to enhancing its offerings for travel agents in the competitive industry landscape.
CEO Abbas Datoo told the conference: Qasim had a career at McKenzie where he was earning probably hundreds of thousands of pounds a year to come into travel, and his family backed him and put the money in. Qasim came into the business, and the first thing he did was he said, “We’re cutting the direct sell business,” and the family said, “That’s a couple of million quick down the drain,” because when you come into a business, you don’t kill a revenue stream. Qasim was very adamant; he said, “There is a lack of true authenticity in the trade to support the trade. Everybody else has a hidden direct sell brand, a hidden direct sell outlet; my business,” he said, “is going to be purely for the travel agent. It is going to be there to do everything it can to support the agent. We will only succeed if the travel agent succeeds.” We thought he was nuts, but his strategy has proven to be a success, and today we are recognized as being the trade’s best friend. We won the Travel Gossip Award last year for the agent favourite tour operator, and that is a testament to how much we do to support the travel agent. We go out there not just waiting for the phone to ring and a travel agent to make the booking, but to give the travel agent the tools to be able to drive those bookings and to make those conversions.
I’m going to address an elephant in the room because I think a lot of you know that we took an investment from the parent company of InteliTravel a few months ago. Intell Travel is part of a much larger organization that owns hospitals, hotels, and real estate across the US, and their parent company bought into about half the company a couple of months ago. But we are not part of IntelliTravel, so Major Travel retains operational independence, and we only benefit from Major Travel; we don’t benefit from IntelliTravel. So Major Travel is still very much focused on supporting all travel agents, and IntelliTravel continues to be just one of our clients.
It goes without saying that our service is exceptional, our product is innovative. We don’t just look for what everybody else is selling and then try and do the same; we go out and hunt product, and when we find it, we promote it. Customers love it, and everybody else then follows, but that first mover advantage often means that you as agents get the competitive edge on direct sale, because what we are here to do is help travel agents compete against the direct sell operators. We believe that agents are still the future. The online model came along and caused some disruption, but people have realized, especially through COVID, that agent expertise is what makes a truly exceptional holiday. So we continue to innovate and drive more and more tools to allow agents to be able to serve their customers using their expertise.
Some things that we’ve got coming up in the AI space are very exciting. For the last year, we’ve been recording all our calls, but our AI engine has been listening to those calls, and it’s been picking out all the little gems of information and creating this massive database. So those quirky little questions that customers have about a kids’ club in a specific hotel and what they offer, well, when an agent has spoken about it, that then gets recorded in the database, and very soon we’re going to have this AI tool that agents will be able to consult for these types of questions and give instant answers to their clients. The AI engine will also be able to take in data, so you’ll plug in some basic information about your customer and their needs, and it will create a fully fledged itinerary for you that you can go and price up. And even if you’ve already created an itinerary, you’ll be able to throw that into the AI engine and write up a really beautiful description that will create this immersive reading experience for your client when they are reading the presentation that you’re giving them. The objective is that when they see that itinerary, it doesn’t just become one more itinerary that they receive, but something that’s going to actually convert into a real booking.
We’re very excited to be here in Ireland. We’ve got a short video to play now, and we look forward to talking to all of you over the next couple of days and we look forward to working with you all.
