December peak season travel is fast approaching and tour operators continue to face availability challenges in the face of record demand.
Sandi Elkington, from Pulse Africa, said the operator had continued to receive last-minute booking requests on a daily basis.
Frank Glettenberg, Chief Operating Officer at Africa220, said it was experiencing a serious lack of inventory in the Western Cape and Kruger region during the December-January peak, making it challenging to accommodate last-minute bookings.
Live access to available inventory is crucial to securing these last-minute bookings. “While a consultant is phoning around to find availability, a competitor, or even the client, has found the last available room online,” he said.
Craig van Rooyen, Director at Tour d’Afrique, said accessing live availability became more important over weekends and when an operator such as Tour d’Afrique worked with different markets that operated in different time zones. He added that many reservation departments didn’t work over the weekends and using an online reservations system with connections into all the major hotel chains and lodges around the country allowed them to make bookings immediately during that time.
Earlier this year, Classic Portfolio launched an online availability portal to help trade partners plan journeys across its portfolio. “With so many trade partners on polar ends of the world, this portal bridges the time gap and helps them provide a more efficient service to their clients,” said Suzanne Bayly-Coupe of Classic Portfolio. She said there seemed to be a presumption that there was no availability over peak season and that the online availability portal helped them find availability when they thought there was none.
Destination knowledge and information sharing are also crucial in accommodating last-minute bookings in the face of availability challenges. Glettenberg encourages operators to be creative with their itineraries, and also to master the skill of selling, to convince a client of a great holiday despite its not being 100% what they had requested.
Elkington and Maria Steyn, Scheduled Tours Manager at Jenman African Safaris, also suggested making alternative suggestions to clients. For example, Jenman will always research a second accommodation option situated close to the original choice.
Elkington said the operator also relied on availability reports generated in-house. While they tried to determine how flexible the client was and do their best to accommodate them, she said what helped was sharing reports during peak season that stored information about availability.
