COLLETTE Travel CEO Dan Sullivan today confirmed the tour operator’s revenues have already recovered to 83% of 2019 levels, with the company having so far operated more than 1,500 post-pandemic departures.
Speaking in Cairns this morning at the 2022 Collette Forum, Sullivan said most of the demand was coming from the US market, with other source markets including Australia and Canada slower to respond to the reopening of destinations.
However “2023 looks very optimistic…once travel turns on people go, and they want to go, and it makes a difference”.
In America about half of the retail market is “saying they want to travel somewhere,” Sullivan said, but the propensity for group travel is lower, with about 35% of the US market keen to get going.
He said border reopenings were a key factor in driving demand, citing the example of Ireland which reopened on 01 Jul last year, and just four weeks later “we had three groups in there”.
“It’s a matter of getting the message out that, hey, you can go, and building confidence in travellers,” Sullivan said.
Collette has also seen a very strong response to its “cancel for any reason” policy which has helped reassure tentative travellers and convince them to put their money down.
Another key factor that has kept Collette in good stead is that the company refunded 100% of all bookings which were forced to be cancelled during the pandemic – an amount in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
Sullivan is very positive about the recovery of the touring sector, saying he believes it’s “going to come back stronger than all of the other markets”.
“The only way to see the world right is to do it by land,” he said.
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Source: traveldaily