This week Mystery Shopper was in Chester. She was a single mother looking for a holiday for herself and her two children to Majorca or another of the Spanish islands.
According to Gingerbread, the charity for lone parents, nearly a quarter of families are headed by one parent. Generally the agencies did well, particularly with some offers of free child places. However, the agents had a lack of product specifically tailored to this market to offer.
Do you think tour operators do enough to cater for this market or can it be difficult to find a good deal for single parents?
We are a tour operator that specialises in fully escorted group holidays for single parent families and have been operating since 2002. We work closely with our hotels to get the best possible deal for single parents without the standard 'based on two adults sharing' policy.
This can be a hard nut to crack especially at peak when suppliers can derive greater income from so-called 'regular' family bookings. We can also only sell during school holidays, for obvious reasons, which makes this process even more challenging.
We would like to work with agencies and have made approaches in the past but there doesn't seem to be a lot of interest. As a specialist market, many of our clients, especially first timers, are nervous and have many questions that do need to be properly answered and fears addressed or the booking is easily lost, this is an obvious concern to us and may well be what also scares the agents off and we know there is concern that they would not 'keep' those clients beyond the initial booking.
In a commercial world, finding the best deal for single parent family holidays will always be a challenge but we do try to acheive this.
Small Families - www.smallfamilies.co.uk
I am absolutely amazed that once again Travel Weekly have featured an article via the mystery shopper on travel for single parents and through out not one agent was aware of ANY of the specialist companies out here dealing with the single parent market nor at any time has the editor in charge quoted any of us.
Small Families Holidays is a specialist Tour Operator who have been offering quality group holidays to the single parent market successfully for a number of years. We have been featured on GMTV and in a number of national newspaper articles but still no one contacted us for our opinion on the market place. Gingerbread, a charitable organisation, were asked their opinion but isn't that also making an assumption that all single parent families are charity cases?
Shame on the travel agencies, we have been trying to work with them for a number of years so that Single parent families can get the kind of holiday they want and deserve. There are many confident travellers out there but there are also a lot of nervous single parents and a high proportion of them have more than 1 child to contend with whilst travelling through airports and need the reassurance of a company such as ours.
We as specialists take care of these families right from the airport of departure making sure there are no problems at check-in (very often the children have different surnames to their accompanying parent), they are hosted in the destination by a friendly, professional Small Families Host in case of any problems and are more often than not flying back home from their holiday with the Host accompanying them.
It is time to put this constant question of 'are the travel trade doing enough for the single parent market' to bed for good. I would like to invite Travel Weekly to speak to us and to help us to educate the travel trade and to advise them that we are here, not just Small Families Holidays, there are other operators but because we are small specialists we don't seem to have a voice within the trade.
Travel Agents. You are welcome to speak to us about our product, we would welcome you with open arms!
Carole Cooper
Small Families Holidays (ATOL 5801)
Tel: 01767 650312
Email: carole@smallfamilies.co.uk
www.smallfamilies.co.uk
It is interesting to see another mystery shopper enquiry where all the visited shops have failed totally in providing a suitable holiday. To suggest that single parents travel on a normal mainstream holiday is a total lack of understanding about Single Parents and their needs. Back in 2001, Carole Cooper and Allen Miller (Allen is a single parent)realised that Single Parents were being ignored by the travel trade so started the company "Small Families Holidays" (ATOL 5801) which introduced the concept of special single parent holidays onto the UK market with the first group travelling in 2002. Carole and Allen realised that Single Parents have very special needs that generally cannot be served by big mainstream operators because of the huge costs and time involved.
Single Parent Travel is a huge opportunity for Travel Agents but despite our efforts we have not found any agency interested. Small Families is proud of its product and professionalism and despite being copied is easily the UK's market leader. Small Families Holidays, have developed a very impressive portfolio of departures giving our clients such a range of opportunities they struggle to decide where they want to go on holiday. Whilst you may find it hard to believe some of our clients have two or three seperate one week holidays with us each year so don't work under the assumption that all single parents want cheap. If I could invite you to check out our website you will see why they travel with a true specialist such as us. www.smallfamilies.co.uk
I am also surprised and very disappointed that a publication such as Travel Weekly has failed to acknowledge the existence of Small Families Holidays in its final report, meaning that it also is not prepared to undertake any research. A quick search on any web search engine would have found us! Finally I would like to point out that there is absolutely no comparison between our product and those recommended by the visited shops. Ours, as all our clients would agree is far superior.
Allen Miller
Small Families Holidays.
Tel: 01767 650312