I must confess to be a “Brand” convert, believing nothing is more important than building brand traffic to reduce ever increasing Google advertising cost and its nice to be Chairman of a brand like Teletext Holidays, which I’ve interacted with an for over 25 years now.

Teletext is lucky to enjoy unprompted brand recognition levels of 40%, which puts it on a par with UK travel giants such as TUI, Thomas Cook and Expedia. This alone delivers significant volumes of direct brand traffic via SEO and PPC channels, reducing average customer acquisition costs compared to other OTA players such as Travel Republic, On the Beach and Love Holidays.

Unfortunately, our customer “Consideration” is much lower as many customers lost touch with Teletext when it ceased to power the pages behind their TV and moved fully online. We are obviously addressing this with above the line TV advertising and sponsorship deals such as the recently announced tie up with newly promoted Sheffield United (Another historic giant on the rise).

Legacy brands such as Teletext Holidays also offer a key advantage that customers already know what the brand stands for. Extensive research shows that customers view Teletext as a “late deal” offer site for beach holidays booked by phone.

To offer the “by phone” service we outsource call fulfilment to Truly Travels Indian based call centre, at a considerably reduced cost versus an equivalent sized UK call centre. Conversion levels are extremely healthy compared to any UK call centre, and our ability to switch and directionally sell products means we have enjoyed strong margin growth, however the NPS scores were not at an acceptable level when I joined and have been a KPI that we have been looking working hard to improve.

It’s my belief that in today’s world of social media and review scores, focusing on the customers that do not book with you has never been more important as word of mouth and review scores can kill or make a brand. However, like many call centres our metrics and focus was primarily on conversion levels and profitability per call alone.

In order to find a cost effective solution to this problem we looked towards our sister technology business Zen3, and worked with them on the development of their Sayint Speech to Text system which has revolutionised our approach.

Sayint allows us to record every inbound and outbound call into the call centre and then translate these in too written words, so that they can be data mined using the latest big data AI (Artificial Intelligence) algorithms.

Sayint has allowed us to create “Sentiment” algorithms weighting basic factors such as call length, hold times, silences etc. and then overlay them with scoring based on the presence of both positive and negative phrases. Some examples of negatives are phrases such as “Can you repeat that, pardon, that’s more expensive, I don’t want that” and phrases like “Can I talk to your manager”. Over a period of time we have built algorithms that we use to automatically rate a call, in terms of customers satisfaction levels.

These allow us to generate a ranking by agent and an understanding of which agents are scoring well for service whether the customer books or not. The correlation between top seller and generator of highest customer satisfaction over all is often not what you may expect. The tool also allows managers to walk through calls with an agent, using drill down tools that allow them to enter the written conversational record where that negative phrase occurred, so they can then listen to that exact section of the call and coach a better approach.

This has allowed us to focus management review and training precisely where it was needed, which in turn has increased the average satisfaction levels on non-booking calls by 26%, as well as increasing call centre conversion by 15%.

It is however the improvement in satisfaction levels on non-booking calls that Teletext continues to focus on because this is both where its ability to increase profits lies and the biggest numerical influence on its average review scores in sites like Trust Pilot and Feefo. Good scores in these areas in my opinion make customers more likely to click on your brand adverts when they see them or book with you if they are looking for that third party reassurance.

Sayint also has allowed Truly to reduce its call audit team from 10 to 4 whilst increasing the volume of audited calls by 400%, by being able to accelerate the speed at which keywords in booking calls can be found.

Like most large call centres, I know we have and continue to have quality issues to deal with due to a relatively high staff turnover, but at least management now have a tool in Sayint that gives them the measurability and visibility to force the required action to make improvements.

At the recent Travel Weekly lunch briefing, Easyjet CEO Carolyn Macal admitted that EasyJet Holidays tended to get lost in the priorities of an airline carrying 58m customers and needed a separate management team to focus on it.

Having provided the technology powering Easyjet holidays for the last three years and the launch platform for Jet2 Holidays, I feel reasonably well positioned to contrast both company’s approaches.

Philip Meeson has relentlessly driven the growth of both the low-cost airline Jet2.com and Jet2Holidays on a very personal basis. Philip quickly realised that having a tour operation to complement his low-cost airline distribution, offered some major strategic opportunities.

Yield management

Low cost airlines use a yield model where they move prices up from launch, as buckets of seats are sold, depending on how its computerized algorithms estimate the required rate of sale, based on historical sales patterns by destination. However, the yield program also looks at the comparative price of other low cost airlines, since this obviously impacts the rate of sale. Price competition between airlines based on highly transparent flight only prices often suppresses yield.

Jet2 quickly realized that “package holiday” sales not only gave it another distribution channel, but because prices are “opaque”, gave it the ability to dump the prices of seats on slow moving routes, in a hidden way without impacting the higher volume flight only prices.

Early sales.

Low cost carriers tend to achieve higher average sales prices, the earlier the sales pattern is on a route, as early sales allow it to move seat only prices up faster and still achieve the targeted load factor.

Package holidays have an earlier booking pattern than flight only and thus have been credited with allowing Jet2.com to achieve higher average yields than some of its competitors.

Route development.

Initially Jet2.com saw its holiday program as a volume top up on its traditional flight only routes, but as volumes have grown, it now deploys aircraft based on its holiday company’s requirements and tops up sales with flight only.

The above points only work if you have a “One Company View” of profitability, with one yield team making the crucial seat pricing decisions and flowing those prices into both companies equally or with hidden discounts to the tour operations. For example, agents are often forced to sell Jet2 Holidays simply because the tour operation has access to lower priced seats than they can package up themselves using Jet2.com.

However, in my opinion the most significant decision Jet2.com made was in recognizing that the management of a tour operation is a very different skill set to managing an airline. They therefore recruited experienced operators like Steve Heapy,

who in turn picked up a lot of the staff Thomas Cook made redundant when they closed the Air tours operation in Rochdale.

The proof is very much shown in the results with Jet2 Holidays on the way to taking the number 2 spot in the UK away from Thomas Cook, with holiday carrying of over 2m passengers, whilst Easyjet collaboration with Hotel Beds has generated a much lower number.

In September 2017 the deal with Hotel Beds comes to an end and it will be very interesting to see what Easyjet decide to do next. At the end of the day, they still have the most customer focused brand in the low-cost sector and in my opinion could easily become one of the top 3 UK tour operators. But, only if they achieve the focus that Carolyn has now recognized is required.