Flight Centre UK on the up

FLIGHT Centre UK is planning to make flights bookable online later this month and recruiting more call centre support staff in response to growing customer demand.
Currently, hotels, car hire, attractions and insurance are bookable online. The initial stage of online flight bookings will see scheduled net and published fares available with charter and low-cost airlines to follow.
E-commerce director Brett Warbrick said the facility to dynamically package hotels with flights and to buy pre-packaged tours is also in the pipeline.
Despite the launch of Flight Centre’s transactional website earlier this year, Warbrick said there hadn’t been a need to make flights bookable online until about nine months ago when demand outstripped supply.
“Our website works very well at generating enquiries – almost too well. Around half of our enquiries come from the website and 11% of our website users actually contact us. This is great, but we couldn’t cope with the demand.”
To support online flight bookings Warbrick is hoping to recruit up to 50 staff to work in the New Malden-based call centre in the next six months, reaching a total of up to 70. The call centre opened in January this year to help with the agency’s rapid expansion plans.
Warbrick is also working on a project to link the call centre, stores and website with the same technology to improve customer relationship management.
“When a customer makes a booking with us online, we want to be able to direct that person to their nearest store. And if they’re a repeat booker we want to assign them to someone they’ve perhaps talked to before.”