Hi Will,
Great idea but again not top of my list at present - I'm hoping you'll reinstate the longer Turkey tour though, along the lines of the Travelsphere tour. Julia mentioned that the team was looking into it a while back?? I also want to visit Greece at some stage, so a tour combining a comprehsive Turkey tour with highlights of Greece might be up my street!
Also I agree with Sim1's comments - I'd be very interested in the Land of the Dragon/Tibet tour but seeing as I only did the Inspirational China tour last Sept I wouldn't want to duplicate Shanghai and Chengdu so soon. I know the tour has to start somewhere, but perhaps the Shanghai itinerary could be radically different to the Inspirational China tour? Just a thought. I am also afraid it might disappear from the schedule before I have a chance to do it however!
A final question for you, seeing as I've only been travelling with JY for just under five years: when you "rest" a tour due to low numbers or whatever, do you usually have it in mind to "resurrect" it (albeit in a possibly different form) a few years down the road? I've seen the polar bear experience dropped and brought back with great success and Nepal reintroduced in a different format, as well as Japan. I'm just wondering will Malaysia/Borneo reappear at some stage and what other destinations you might be thinking of introducing further down the line? If you were able to give us some hints of future plans e.g. you were hoping to introduce Ethiopia, Malaysia etc in two or three years time, it could stop some of us going with another company in the meantime!!
Sorry for going off topic!
Cheers,
Bob
Hi Bob, always happy to answer your questions!
Turkey is having a difficult year across the whole of the travel industry. For that reason we have not pursued that longer tour idea any further just yet I'm afraid.
on the Land of the Dragon, you are right, we do have to start the tour somewhere. With the very difficult flight routing we use on that tour we are very limited and so we pretty much had to do Shanghai & Chengdu. Shanghai is a 2 night stay at the start just to acclimatise to the time zone etc and if we did an itinerary which didn't visit the major highlights, I know from experience there would be people disappointed about that fact. Over in Chengdu, it is one of the most popular things we do as a business. I have had so many lovely letters from people and so many saying they wouldn't hesitate to do it all again - so again, it felt the right thing to do. In between that we tried to include the real off the beaten track places that show the real China off. So although there may be some duplication, hopefully it is minimal!
Resting a tour is an interesting question.... It is sometimes a sensitive way of saying we have discontinued a tour - but I would never ever say a tour wouldn't be introduced - so that's why we say 'rest' rather than 'cancel'. Sometimes we genuinely do plan to give a tour a year off, tweak it to make it better, let people's desire to go build up again and relaunch. Suffice to say there are no set rules and we make our decisions based on what is popular AND the comments from people on the forum - you all have so much influence on us (and hopefully you have seen first hand evidence of that many times!).
I do love to try and share with you what we are thinking about but I have to be a bit careful for a number of reasons. I would expect competing companies read these forums and info like that is a little sensitive. The other thing is that if I said to you we were working on Ethiopia and it didn't come to fruition you would be more annoyed than if you never knew we were working on it the first place I dare say. I know I mentioned we had looked into Madagascar last year, fortunately we came out with Namibia which you seemed to like instead. But I would hate to let anyone down - especially with something as important as holidays!
