It’s All Panic Stations

I have mentioned in some of my previous blogs about the end of July and through August being the late season in the travel industry. Where traditionally a lot of the people contacting us are wanting to travel within the next few weeks to grab some last minute summer sun and hoping to grab a bargain in the process.  This year has been no different, I have been speaking with a number of people every day who are looking to do just that.

This year though there seems to be more panic between people than ever before, simply because the cruise lines don’t have as much inventory left as they usually would at this stage.  Normally during this period, if you were to call me I would be able to give you a list of cruises that I could offer, each at an absolute bargain of a price, but this year on numerous calls it is becoming a struggle to find anything of choice.  With all the attacks that have happened in Europe this year, a lot of the cruise lines started to lower their pricing a lot earlier than normal, as there was a fear that the Americans weren’t willing to travel for Europe and so they wanted to start to make up that deficit as early as possible.

The fallout from this has been that the amount of choice that we have to sell is a lot more restricted than normal, there isn’t the stock left to sell with many cruise lines now saying that they don’t have a single cabin left to sell for cruises until mid-September and what is left is shifting fast.

I was assisting a gentleman this week to book him and his family in two cabins in August and we found the perfect cruise with the right dates and the right price.  Over the course of the day the everything has been there available as we were changing a few options with this slightly with hotel stays, and when it came to confirm the booking, the cabins that he wanted vanished from the system.  I don’t know how many times I clicked refresh on my screen panicking that they had gone.  I was on hold to the cruise line for 30 mins trying to get through, then the cabins came back so I grabbed them.  I was then kicked out of the system and the cabins again vanished, and me and one of the team at the cruise line head office spent an hour trying to get these cabins.  In the end it looks like the cabins were sold by another agent and so we couldn’t book them.  I had to call the customer back and inform him that we only had mini-suites now available and he said just book them.  Again we had the same problem where the cabins where available and then not, in the end I managed to get these confirmed for him, but I tell you now, that evening a bottle of wine was deserved.

In 10 years in travel, I have never known anything like it.  My recommendation really is, and I cannot stress this enough, if you are looking to travel in august this year, call up and book now as there are some options left but come this time next week there really won’t be any cabins at all in the med available.