Re: FLT - Flight Centre
You've got to think about who are a big segment of the market - the Grey Nomads as you mention. My mum is one and is about to head off on an overseas trip with another grey nomad friend of hers. Now some people amongst that group (and probably younger) would still want to do everything through a travel agent, but my mum and her friend are quite good at researching and finding deals online. Here is the clincher though - they are terrified at paying for anything online. They don't have the smarts to be confident that they are handing over their credit card details online to a legitimate business versus someone dodgy. They are scared of paying online unless it is through their internet banking. At the end of the day, I am the one that goes over everything, does a bit more googling to find if there is any better deal, vets everything and then I actually do all the online ordering for her using her credit card details. She is too scared of making a mistake or getting scammed.
You may have heard recently about the scammers who are hijacking the emails of legitimate accommodation providers and then posing as the legitimate business owner, taking incoming enquiries and orders and defrauding the customer of their money. They get the customer to pay by internet transfer and it is impossible to recover the money. The customer turns up to their destination and only then do they (and the accommodation provider) become aware of the fraud. A young Aussie bride was on the tele only a couple of weeks ago. She had booked a villa in Bali for her entire bridal party and it was only when they turned up and someone else was staying at the villa that they found out the had been scammed.
And the last part of this post is why flight centre is so sucessful. I think people struggle to understand flight centre. flight centre is your bunnings of the travel industry. Since FLT came into existence margins on all travel bookings have been squeezed enormosly.
FLT offers several different things to the market, business, full service and budget. People who think they will have to pay more using their service are wrong. FLT policy is too beat any available offer, that means, if u research your holiday as so many say they are good at, you will pay less at FLT. Often they may mean that if your trip is going to cost you say $3000 you will only save $1 by taking it to flight centre (but the other bonuses are much better), but I personally booked a client his $3000 accomodation package to Malaysia and saved him $1000 on the best price he could get himself (on a price beat).
The bigger advantage to booking with FLT (ie if you only save a $) is you eliminate risk, for example turning up to your wedding and having no were for 100? guests to stay. Fraud, not getting what you paid for, your booking disapearing or you simply making a mistake can cost $100's - 1000's of dollars.
Two examples, my parents booked through an agent and when there accomodation and tour did not match thier booking they had to fork out an extra $800 for 2 nights accomodation - all reimbursed by the agent.
I also ad a client that took his family to bali and there was an error in his booking (through the airlines onseller) where by his flight was the day before he expected to come home. The mistake cost $12,000 on a $15,000 holiday, again covered and again, he didnt have to do anything to fix it.
Anyway, no Idea if this stock is a buy or not and no longer work for them, but just think it is relevant to point out that the internet will not kill their business.
cheers