Gold Medal boss urges agents to maintain respect for supplier staff

Gold Medal management have had to intervene to cut off some travel agent calls because callers were not respecting the operator’s staff, the ITT conference in Istanbul was told.

Simon Applebaum, managing director of B2B supplier Gold Medal Travel Group, criticised the industry for an “inordinate amount of finger pointing” during the Covid pandemic.

Applebaum, who took a short period out of travel during Covid to work in the health sector, called for the industry to understand the strains everyone is under and to work together.

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Agency boss calls for end to operator staff abuse

He said: “I do not think we have ever been more divided.”

Applebaum added: “We are not just competing for customers, we are competing for staff, which adds to the rivalries.

“I’m having to cut off customers because they are not speaking to my staff with due deference and respect, and this is a B2B business.

“These are professional people ringing up and not able to conduct themselves in the way you would expect. We need to take a moment to think about that.

“These people are part of our wider community. When we scare people off it hurts all of us. It’s a really self-damaging thing to do.”

Applebaum said the sector has to be “honest” and accept that it is a less attractive place to work in than it was three years ago.

He said while there are some great initiatives to try to attract the right talent into the sector, finding the right people is harder than it used to be.

“We are all going to have to get used to doing as much work with less people, and actually less experienced people,” he said.

“For every 10 people I hire I have to take three experienced ones off the phones to train them up. We have to take account of some of the strains that causes.”

Applebaum said using technology to ease pressures on staff is a “huge opportunity” and called on the sector to work on common standards to operate in a more “joined up” way.

“We need to be really focused on not only our own houses, our own systems, but developing standards beyond individual businesses,” he added.

Gold Medal has taken 433,000 calls over the last two years and dealt with 788,000 customer service enquiries and 750,000 schedule changes.

The firm has also processed more than a quarter of a million refunds and issued 23 versions of its Covid playbook for travel agents.

Applebaum said this was happening while the business did an “amazing job” rationalising and merging Travel 2 and Gold Medal, resulting in the closure of the T2 office in Glasgow.

He described this as “quite an unprecedented amount of demand” on a team that was not built to handle it.

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Agency boss calls for end to operator staff abuse