Hi everyone,
I have travelled with Just You on many occasions now and would much prefer departures from Manchester as having to change at Heathrow adds the the journey time considerably. When I went to China via Heathrow the journey was much too long and would not do this again.
I now pick holidays only flying from Manchester and would take more long haul if flights were available. I could travel to London the day before but this would use up more holiday leave. If I had to change I would prefer to change in London. I really wanted to do the trip to Carcassonne but I would have to change at Heathrow and for such a short journey this was impractical.
I wanted to say thank you for sharing all of your thoughts regarding flights from non-London airports. Hopefully I can explain a little why we do not have a large selection of regional options on each tour and I also would like to get your thoughts on some of the things that we can do to help.
When we saw the thread a couple of weeks back we sat down with our Aviation team and set about going through all of our best selling tours in the hope that we could easily add in some extra regional options for you. However, it was not quite as straightforward as we had hoped.
Although airports such as Newcastle, Manchester, Glasgow and Bristol do offer a great number of destinations, actually marrying those up with our tours is a much harder task. Days of operation, flight timings and having different start and end airports are all major factors. Some regional carriers, like Ryanair, will not even permit us to use their flights at all unfortunately.
We are also committed to delivering you the best possible Just You experience and so we are very mindful of having just a couple of people going from a regional airport where there is no Tour Manager and they do not get to meet with the group until they are in resort. We know from the feedback that we have received that many guests would much rather all be together. Although I am sure there are some seasoned travellers who would not see this as an issue. Would you still be inclined to book if you knew that the Tour Manager would not be travelling with you?
In terms of Long Haul holidays, there are sometimes flights from regional airports, especially Manchester, but very rarely will they be direct and so there may be long connection times and there is also the experience of having to change planes in a strange country when there is no Tour Manager around to assist - again, we want to make sure that our guests are getting the best possible Just You experience.
We do listen to your feedback though and we want to try and give you the holidays that you want. One of the ideas that we came up with was offering dedicated departures from a certain alternative airport, such as Manchester, on a set date or dates each year for tours with the appropriate routes available. Obviously this would mean that there would be less choice of dates but you would all still be travelling as one group with a Tour Manager. Would that be the sort of thing that would be better for us to look into for you?
Another question we would be very interested to know your thoughts on - where no direct regional flights are available, would you rather change planes in London or abroad?
We would love to hear from you so that we can offer the holidays that you want!
Thanks a lot
Will
