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Travel Industry Terminology...
Retail Travel - Travel Agents sell foreign package holidays, flights, car hire, hotels, theatre tickets, coach, British rail, and tailor made holidays to the general public. They make their money through commission from selling the above services.
Business Travel - Travel organisations often have separate division to specialise in handling the business travel arrangements for their clients. They usually contract their clients for a period of time (1-5 years) and accounts fall into categories of small (under £500,000), medium (£ 1 million) large - (over £1 million) Companies often tend to get several accounts from certain sectors of industry - i.e City travel companies often get banking/finance accounts, West End companies get Advertising/PR type accounts. There is fierce competition for these accounts. The main skills required in business travel are client relation skills, CRS skills and excellent knowledge of ticketing. Retail Agents can also handle business travel accounts - usually local and therefore install CRS systems to cope with the extra flight reservations.
Tour Operators - These are travel companies which organise package holidays and sell them through travel agents. There are many departments involved in making up a package holiday. Contracting Departments contract cut price deals with hoteliers abroad and other services such as aircraft, car hire, coach etc, Operations Department put the deals together and devise the packages, Sales and Marketing Departments firstly research the resorts and once the brochure has been compiled send Sales Execs to agents to promote the brochure, Brochure Production departments use in-house and outsourced methods to create the brochures, Reservations Departments take reservations directly from public or from agents, Ticketing Departments issue the flight tickets, Admin Departments issue the hotel vouchers and organise all the necessary paperwork for the client, Overseas Departments inform the Reps and hotels in the resort of passenger lists, Accounts depts keep a track of payments and commissions...etc. Tour Operators can be as departmentalised as explained above or as small as two or three people taking on the duties of all the above to produce a specialist package holiday such as 'sailing', ' adventure hols' etc. The most common reservations system in tour operators is ATOP however most tour operators have their own tailor made system because of the varying sizes of companies.
Incoming Tour Operators - These are companies who specialise in 'land arrangements' (hotels, restaurants, ferry, car hire, excursions - everything but flights) for those travellers coming into the UK or Europe. These travellers are often groups of people although individual arrangements are also made. Working in the 'Incoming' Sector usually requires strong linguistic and organisational abilities. These companies do not require any licences. They often have their own in-house system or a system called Tourplan linked with a WP. Their sales departments build up strong contacts with travel agents abroad and usually have good negotiators for all levels of hotel accommodation. The sales teams therefore travel extensively around the UK and around the world.
ABTA - Association of British Travel Agents. Agents must pay a bond to ABTA to sell foreign package holidays which is usually proportioned to their annual turnover.
IATA - International Air Transport Association. Agents can sell flights without an IATA licence but can only issue tickets with a licence.
ATOL - Air Travel Organisers Licence - This is required by Tour Operator to make up package holidays.
Viewdata - Travel Agents make package holidays reservations through this system, which accesses directly into the Tour Operators system.
CRS - Computer Reservations System-Those agents who have IATA licences or sell lots of flights usually have one of the Computer Reservations systems which accesses directly into the airlines system. These are mainly Sabre, Galileo, Apollo, Pars (Worldspan).
F.I.T - Fully inclusive tour- These are holidays tailored to the clients requirements as opposed to buying a package holiday.
BA 1,2,3 - These are exams in ticketing: 1 being the most basic to 3 being extremely skilled in multi sector ticketing.
Implants - These are satellite travel departments within the business travel clients premise. Travel staff are employed by the travel company but can offer a more 'personal service' to the clients within their offices.
Charter flights - Tour Operators hire aircraft for whole seasons at a discount and sell them to the public in the form of a package. Any surplus seats are sold through travel agents.
Scheduled flights - IATA sets all fares internationally so that there are no fluctuations in price due to currency. Schedule fares are therefore quoted from a fare rule book which is computerised or manual.
Consolidators - Companies which make deals with individual airlines to get cut price tickets to sell their seats in bulk. These companies are called Appointed Consolidators. They then mark them up and sell them for profit to the general public. Other travel agents (with or without licences) can buy these cheap seats if the appointed consolidator cannot sell all of them. This is not recognised by IATA but goes on because airlines cannot guarantee to fill all their seats all of the time.
Direct sell - These are travel companies which sell direct to the public and not through agents.
Wholesale - These are departments within tour operators who take reservations from travel agents.
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