Gecko's Adventures guarantees all trips
Gecko’s Adventures is confident that its decision to guarantee all departures in 2013 will not see the company incur any losses.
The adventure travel firm today announced that all of its trips in 2013 would be 100% guaranteed to take place regardless of numbers booked on each departure.
The move by the adventure travel firm follows the September announcement by G Adventures that it would guarantee to operate all trips from January 1 irrespective of how many people have booked.
While G Adventures founder Bruce Poon Tip conceded the firm expected to see losses in the order of $800,000, Gecko’s head of product and operations Ken Ismail is more optimistic.
“We expect to lose nothing,” he told Travel Today. “The gains made by the fact that we’re 100% guaranteed are going to outweigh any losses.”
While he admitted the move by G Adventures had, to an extent, prompted the change, Ismail confirmed it had been under consideration for some time.
“In fact, the entire Gecko’s South East Asia program has been 100% guaranteed for two years already,” he said.
“Everyone knows that customers want guaranteed departures and I’m sure we won’t be the last ones to introduce them. We’ve all been sitting in the same space.”
Ismail revealed the real drivers of the decision were recent analysis on how to implement the change and a streamlining of its product.
“We’ve reduced some of our inventory of trips and are focusing on the top product that we know does really well,” he said.
Instead of leaving customers in a “hiatus” for months while the operator waited for further bookings to come in, they could now go ahead with planning confident in the knowledge the tour would take place, he said. Travel agents will also benefit from the certainty provided by the new arrangements.
Meanwhile, Ismail would not disclose details of the firm’s “new direction”, but he confirmed an announcement will be made in January.
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