Travel Niche Blog

Thompson have announced the loss of 2,600 jobs in their UK call centers after a drop in demand for telephone bookings.

Announcing extensive restructuring, the German parent company TUI said that it was cutting 3,600 staff throughout Europe but the majority of cuts would fall to the UK where the tourism and leisure business had changed the most.

TUI said that the rise of the independent traveller was responsible for the job cuts. After the rise of the low cost airline, more and more people are booking a flight and hotel online, seperately rather than buying a holiday package. At the same time TUI announced that they would be expanding their own online presence in the holiday market by opening a web portal dedicated to flight bookings.

Holidays from the UK have always been too expensive compared with the rest of Europe, in my opinion, and it looks like that gravy train is over.

Thompson travel have announced they are closing their Glasgow based call centre after 7 years, shedding 450 jobs in the process.

When the call centre opened in 2000, it was viewed as a major investment allowing people to book holidays directly via the telephone instead of using a high street travel agents. This year though, less than 5% of people who booked a holiday package with Thompson used the call centre.

The rapid growth of the internet to book holidays has been cited as the reason for the closure of the call centre. According to the Association of British Travel Agents (Abta), nearly a quarter of package holidays were booked via the internet in 2004, compared with 5% using call centres.
The high street travel agents will probably remain for the foreseeable future though. It seems that the growth in online bookings has mostly been fuelled by people switching from using call centres to the internet. The habits of the high street shoppers are slower to change though!