Are you able to tell us how popular the new tours over the last 18? Months have been overall? How long do you give a tour to settle in? have some surprised you in numbers or lack of numbers. It must be very hard to bring all the different styles and variations to us the customers. I do know that on some tours we are given so many options on dates, I can understand this on say USA in the fall. On others there do seem to be many dates offered, is this because they are small group sizes or is it because they are very popular? Are you able to say which tours historically are the most favourite, I do like the fact that even the favourite ones seem to get tweaked every so often.

I do understand if you cannot answer this on the public boards.

Just keep doing what you are ALL doing I for one very much appreciate all the hard work that goes into these tours.

Cindy

The new tours have really gone well so far. There is the odd one which didn’t quite take off or had some issues like flight schedules, but on the whole we are really pleased. I don’t think we were overly surprised by anything – we do thoroughly research everything before it goes on sale so we know what to expect.

There is no definitive answer to how long you give a tour to settle in. Sometimes it becomes clear very early on that the anticipated desire for a tour isn’t there and so we will make the change. Other times we can see potential and are happy to wait and see.

For all of our tours, we set the number of dates based on what we expect the demand to be like, again, based on lots of research and we aim to operate as many of these as possible, unfortunately on occasion we do have to cancel a couple of dates. Our average group size is 23 overall, some tour groups are smaller by the nature of the holiday (for example our Ultimate Polar Bear Adventure). Then, there are tours where slightly bigger groups are taken because of popularity and because we can get the number of rooms required. You may not realise, but getting allocations for a group of single occupancy rooms can be very difficult because hotel owners want to maximise the number of people in the hotel at any one time – so that is a challenge.

The best selling tours change every year in all honesty, with a few familiar faces all the time. We tweak tours based on customers’ letters, tour managers’ reports, questionnaire scores and local agent feedback as well. We always want to make sure we have the best possible tour available to each destination.

I promise Will and his team will keep on doing what they are doing. I will of course request the help of the Community to keep him on his toes!

Kindest regards,

Julia (& JY Will)

Best wishes,

Bob

thank you so much for a detailed reply, has answered many questions for me.

Thanks

Cindy