How Luxtripper is steering through the crisis

There is also an underpinning focus on offering responsible and meaningful travel, and Luxtripper added Madagascar to its product offering most recently.

“Madagascar gives that perfect blend of stunning landscapes, unique wildlife, and friendly local communities with a fascinating history,” she says.

“Now more than ever, our clients are looking for immersive, meaningful travel that will reconnect them with the world, so we’re delighted to add another destination that brings them just that.

“The way I look at it, we are so blessed to work in travel and to be able to share the best of the world with clients, and Madagascar fits with that,” she says, while acknowledging it’s not somewhere people are going to go to right now.

“For short term travel, it could be that people are still too nervous to book the more experiential, immersive trips and want to stick with what might be considered safe, less populated places, but from next year and as the vaccine rolls out, that will be more likely – people will be back to those kind of places,” she says.

“And what we’re seeing now is this trend for people booking two holidays at once, one they can do as soon as possible, and that longer, more complex one, perhaps for next year.”

Like many travel companies, Luxtripper is seeing larger numbers of people come onto bookings now, suggesting clients are connecting with groups of family or friends, and the average length of stay is nudging up from seven or eight days to 14 and upwards.

“We hear about there being a lot more holiday days around, with people rolling days over as they didn’t use them last year, but I don’t think there is going to be a surge of people taking super-long breaks as such, because companies are going to need people around as business gets going again. We have definitely seen longer stays than our usual coming through though,” she says.

“Overall, this crisis has made people believe that things can be done differently – whether that’s how employers think about how they can run their business, and how teams think about a more collaborative approach and the ‘all in this together’ mentality, or from the consumer side, of how grateful we should be for life. It’s really put things in perspective for a lot of people.”

She says there has also been a much shorter conversion time than pre-pandemic. “It looks like that because everyone’s at home together more they’ve been able to connect to talk about the holiday plans and make decisions quicker, narrowing that window between enquiring and booking.”

Luxtripper has its base in London and employs around 55 people in the UK as well as a team of 17 in India. She says that as a former HR director, she’s always had a “people first” approach to running a business and says “furlough doesn’t really work for travel” in the sense of needing to have people working throughout the crisis, but says she did sadly have to make a handful of redundancies.

She agrees the current trend to flexible and home working necessitated by the pandemic will continue and says the business was already set up to operate in this way before the pandemic. She has since declared a “work from home forever if you want” policy for staff, even when offices can fully reopen.

“People are more productive without that commuting time and they can achieve a better work/life balance, which is a good thing,” she says, adding however that she will still maintain a London office too. During all the lockdowns and work from home orders, the company has been putting on an hour of activity over Zoom every day that people can down tools and tune into, such as a concert, energy healer, gym sessions, or just for the team to chat.

And as for when bookings will start to return to those 2019 days, she says it all depends of course on what’s happening around the world.

“We keep adapting the core product and messaging as and when things change and a flexible guarantee for clients is crucial,” she says. “The question these days is not so much ‘can you get me a deal’, but ‘how will you help me if I need it’. And customers know that a person won’t desert them and will do whatever it takes to get things done – in this regard, travel agents have proven their worth during the crisis.”