Saga to combine holiday operations with sister brand Titan

"Our tour operations business comprising Saga Holidays and Titan Travel, like the rest of the market, has been significantly impacted by Covid-19," said Saga in a trading update issued on Thursday (27 January).

"We are completing the restructuring of our tour operations business to position ourselves for growth and create a lower-cost, more agile and dynamic operation which is focused on the changing needs of our customers.

"We are combining the operations of Saga Holidays and Titan Travel. This will maximise efficiency in touring, where the product offerings are highly complementary, and we will create a new hotel stay proposition to be launched later in 2022.

"Management of our river cruise operation is also being moved to ocean cruise. These actions place us in a strong position as travel restrictions ease and pent-up customer demand builds."

Confirmation of the restructure comes after Saga last week said it would, in future, work with "a smaller group of trade partners.

A Saga spokesperson confirmed to TTG the decision would affect agents selling both Saga’s cruise and holidays product, with a slightly greater skew towards those selling Saga holidays.

The group declined to confirm the extent to which it is scaling back its trade operation, whether it would prioritise certain segments of the travel trade in future, and what effect the decision would have on its trade team.

Following the announcement, Titan Travel’s UK managing director, Andy Squirrell, told TTG the brand was committed to the trade and said it had no plans to step back from agents.

“We have a long-standing and very important relationship with the trade, and a significant part of our business comes from agents,” said Squirrell. “That absolutely remains in our plans going forward."