Sound familiar?

TUI Travel UK and Ireland boss Dermot Blastland is always good value for money when talking to the press, and his ten minute speech at TUI’s first anniversary media bash last night was no exception.

XL Leisure Group’s collapse last week was, Dermot claimed, down to the fact that it “wasn’t a well-run company” and that it “couldn’t compete with the cost-base of large-scale companies like us”.

Scale? Hasn’t lastminute.com’s Ian McCaig made that word his own? Apparently not. Dermot went on to say that the market was polarising into big players such as TUI and Thomas Cook and specialist/niche operators and any businesses “stuck in the middle” will suffer.

TUI of course has a strong set of specialist businesses, so it’s got a good position at both ends of the market. So good a position that Dermot said the business was having “a cracking time”, as indeed is its rival Thomas Cook.

“We’re both having record years,” he confidentally stated.

I wonder if lastminute.com – or any of the online travel agencies - could say a similar thing?


Martin Cowen, chief writer, Travolution

XL: Creative thinking from Co-Op Travel

There were a few examples of good use of the web in the middle of all the offers of "help" from the likes of Ryanair, easyJet et al for stranded passengers overseas as a result of the XL saga.

Standing out was an effort from Co-Operative Travel. On Friday morning online marketing Craif Lefevre snapped up the domain name XL-travel-advice.co.uk and through it onto a basic Wordpress template.

The page included reams of information for consumers and links to the CAA and Abta. The Co-Op branding was not in-your-face at all and carried just one simple "Re-booking Agent" link to the main Co-Op homepage.

The whole thing took Lefevre about an hour to sort out, it's getting a fair amount of travel and it wouldn't be a surprise if he has - er, optimistically - snapped up the domain names for other organisations which may or may not find themselves in a spot of bother in the months ahead.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Travolution Journeys has finally arrived

Not the greatest day to be unveiling our latest edition, given the enormous amount of attention on the collapse of XL, but we are extremely pleased with what we have produced.

So after a few weeks in the making, Travolution Journeys is finally a reality. You can read all the content in Travolution Journeys on our dedicated page on the main Travolution website.

Enjoy.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

XL: Spare a thought for the techies, too

A company of the size and amibition of XL (2006: we will be biggest online travel portal in two years) certainly had plenty of developers, technology and infrastructure experts working for it.

Word reaches Travolution that one particular IT specialist who worked off-site most of the time had a rather unfortunate wake-up call this morning.

Rather than hearing about the collapse of his employer from, er, his employer, his wife had to relay the news after hearing about it on the radio.

[Apparently the majority of other staff were contacted very early by text message, email or phone call, asking them to attend a meeting at 9.15am this morning]

The pitfalls of remote working!

Meanwhile it has emerged that the administrators have kept on two members of staff to coordinate things in the background IT-wise - one on the website side and another overseeing the booking technology.

And for those interested in who are the main partners with XL for its technology:

• Anite - for tours 
• Codegen - for dynamic packaging on XL.com and the bedbank
• Astratis - for flights (bookings) (FreedomFlights)
  

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

XL: Watch those searches go up, up and up

PING! Email arrives from one of the country's major meta search engines.

Interesting data:

In the ten hours following the announcement of XL's collapse, just before midnight last night, searches for flights on routes normally covered by the carrier and its operating arm increased by a massive 260% compared to the same ten hours on Thursday morning.

Full coverage.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

XL: bad for consumers, good for the business?

The collapse of XL Leisure Group this morning is clearly bad news for the 85,000 people currently overseas and the 200,000 or so people who have forward booked (according to BBC figures).

For the trade however, it’s less cut and dry. It might even be “a good thing”.

XLLG is the third largest tour operator in the UK, which makes the collapse front page news. However much we liked Silverjet, it was never carrying 2.3m people a year. XLLG’s product ranged from traditional fly-and-flop to private jets and boutique hotels, so expect tabloids and broadsheets alike to go to town on this tomorrow.

[At the time of writing, the news is the most read story on the BBC site]

It’s difficult to talk about this being good when there are parents telling their children that their holiday have been cancelled, surprise 40th birthday weekends scrapped  and XL employees and suppliers worried about getting paid.

But one good thing is that this massive collapse should, once and for all, alert the UK public to the vagaries of consumer protection. XLLG has, or rather had, a divergent business which is proving to be a real-time case study in what is and isn’t protected.

Surely now is the time for the CAA and ABTA and other bodies to get their act together and kick-start some serious press and PR on this issue. If the public aren’t aware of the difference between a bonded package holiday and a self-assembled break after this collapse, they never will be.

There aren’t too many tears being shed at the HQs of TUI and Thomas Cook. The collapse means that significant capacity has been taken out of the W08/9 and S09 seasons, which will have the revenue management teams whooping for joy.

Investors might also be similarly whooping. At 10.30am this morning – two hours or so after the news broke – Thomas Cook shares had climbed 6.38% on last night’s close; TUI was 5.75% up.

The reasons give by XLLG for its demise are the usual suspects – fuel prices, economic downturn and the inability to get additional funding. Interestingly, XLLG’s French and German operations are not being taken to into administration. It remains to be seen if this is an indication that the UK’s travel market is more vulnerable than the rest of Europe.

Martin Cowen, chief writer, Travolution

XL homepage paints a sorry picture of the industry

[Updates at bottom of the post] 

Another week, another collapse.

But this time it's a big one - XL Leisure Group, the holding company behind XL.com, Kosmar, Freedom Flights, Medlifehotels, Aspire and the Travel City Direct brands, went into administration yesterday evening.

XL is the third largest tour operator in the UK behind Thomas Cook and Thomson Holidays and although it will not be TOO much of a surprise to the industry that it has gone the way of Zoom et al, the fragility of the sector is now hopelessly exposed.

As with previous collapses, details for consumers with what to do are on the XL.com homepage.

UPDATE 8am: Given the sheer scale of the problem and volume of passengers involved, it's no wonder the CAA website is having problems. CAA spokesman tells us: "Overloaded by 200,000 customers with advanced bookings, I'm afraid - hopefully back up soon."

UPDATE 8.05am: Amazing reaction from consumers on Travel Rants blog

UPDATE 8.20am: Dermot Blastland of TUI on BBC Breakfast with Simon Calder of the Independent. Paraphrasing Calder: "Mr Blastland will not say this, but despite the loss of jobs and holidays for consumers, this is actually good news for the industry as it can now start to make money."

UPDATE: 9.30am: Easyjet offers rescue package to stranded flight-only passengers for £75.

UPDATE: 10am: XL press conference from Gatwick. CEO Phil Wyatt looks crushed.

UPDATE: 10.40: Willie Walsh says "not surprised". Other airlines (unnamed) will follow. Walsh reckons around 30.

UPDATE: Go to the Travel Weekly landing page for the joint Travolution-Travel Weekly coverage of the XL collapse.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Technorati tags: XL

Perspective again please

Plenty and rather mixed coverage around the web today regarding the second anniversary edition of the Hitwise-IMRG Hotshops list.

The quarterly report of the top 50 UK online retailers is a handy benchmark of whose flying or dying in the online world, albeit from a share of overall web traffic rather than individual performance.

So what did the May 2008 report reveal, compared to that of May 2006?

There are currently eleven travel brands amongst the top 50 – a list topped unsurprisingly every quarter since it began by Amazon.co.uk.

TravelMole led with how Thomson Holidays is creeping up on easyJet as the most popular travel brand in the UK, while E-Tid said ‘Travel companies lose web presence’. [both require registration]

The report indicated that almost all the leading travel brands – with the exception of Thomson – had seen in a decline in position since the report began two years ago:

EasyJet – 8 to 10
Expedia – 7 to 12
Ryanair – 9 to 14
Lastminute.com – 12 to 17
BA – 11 to 19
Thomas Cook – 18 to 25
First Choice – 20 to 29

Quite a number of travel brands have dropped off the list:

MyTravel (for obvious reasons)
BMIBaby
XL.com
FlyBe
Jet2
InterContinental Hotels
Monarch Airlines
Opodo

The only newcomer in travel:

TravelRepublic

The apparent slump in the performance of travel websites led the Financial Times to headline with ‘Airlines lose web customers’. Lose?

What the FT failed to do is explain in detail why this has happened.

A call to Hitwise’s Robin Goad, co-author of the list, confirms the obvious: travel was an early adopter of e-commerce and consumers, likewise, felt comfortable with booking via the web, thus why so travel sites commanded a large share of the top 50.

In the past two years, however, other retailers have emerged – some traditional offliners, others created to service existing markets but purely online – and have attracted new users.

So while growth in online travel bookings may be slowing compared to other industry verticals, it is by no means declining.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Technorati tags: hitwise IMRG hotshops retail