Originally Posted by
AirportPlanner1
There are quite a lot of long-haul charter destinations served by European airlines that don’t see UK service. Anyone know Nosy Be in Madagascar or Salalah in Oman?! More still when you add in Central/South American and Caribbean places the Canadians go to like Huatulco in Mexico, Rio Hato in Panama.
There are certainly opportunities for long-haul with standards clearly acceptable that lack competition from BA/VS or those from the Middle East. I suspect part of this not being exploited or at least tried is the conservative psyche of the British package customer (perhaps also older Britains more generally) who aren’t comfortable exploring places ‘off the beaten track’. For this there is evidence, for example Thomas Cook (?) tried Sanya in China and that didn’t last long. Tui’s own routes to Langkawi (Malaysia) and Pho Quoc (Vietnam) didn’t return.
Is it really a case Brits being conservative or is it a marketing problem? When those destinations did exist, they were not aggressively marketed. If you have a Jane McDonald TV programme on one of the packages and play it as a way to make a new part of the world affordable to the average Brit, uptake would be stronger. The same is true for any marketing campaign. Think of the last TUI campaign - it's so generic on all platforms and never pushed a destination. Even now, look at the TUI Facebook page. The latest few posts are a colleague talking about their favourite destination and generic photos of Rhodes. What pathetic marketing that is.
If their social media was full of 20 second videos of a family enjoying a safari in Botswana, a couple learning about the traps of the Viet Cong in Ho Chi Minh, or kids running along the Sky Bridge in Langkawi, all accompanied with captions about Britain's most trusted holiday company making the unexplored world affordable to the Brit, and these new destinations can be explored in style with TUI reps holding your hand every step of the way, the uptake would be much higher than not mentioning them all.
It's not even a new strategy, it's what their predecessors used to do in the holiday hypermarkets before Cancun became big. They had all the brochures out and aggressively pushed Mexico at people.