Recently in Operators Category

This morning we ran the following:

Gap Adventures announces 'bold' rebrand

Adventure travel specialist Gap Adventures is changing its name to G Adventures this week. The Canadian company is rebranding its worldwide operations under the new name from October 1.

Founder Bruce Poon Tip described the move as a "bold step" following the operator's more than 20 years in business...

A commenter calling themselves 'Maz' pointed out there was something missing from all this, namely:

...the Federal Court order issued on 24 June 2011 ordering [Gap Adventures boss Bruce Poon Tip] to change the name of his company due to a trademark infringement on the GAP Clothing Store

This is indeed the case. Brand Geek says in a useful summing-up of the legal battle:

Based on the evidence and testimony provided in the case, the Court found G.A.P Adventures infringed on The Gap's marks and engaged in unfair competition with The Gap.  It ruled against The Gap on its trademark dilution claims, finding that G.A.P Adventure's use of "gap" neither blurred (weakened) nor tarnished (disparaged)

So hands up - we weren't aware of that. Hat-tip to Maz.

Nope - not First Choice, which announced it was going all-inclusive-only last week. It's actually Thomas Cook.

A quick, unscientific, at-time-of-writing scan of the comments finds TC Facebook followers agreeing, just. Of the commenters who expressed a preference, 15 say all-inclusive against nine for self-catering or B&B.

What's actually happening here, of course, is that Cook is telling us it offers a range of board bases, which is interesting to see so soon after Tui announced it was splitting AI and SC/B&B between Thomson and First Choice.

While this is only a Facebook post, a 'choice' angle designed to make each of the Tui brands appear limited in isolation is a conceivable response to last week's news.

Quick round-up of some First Choice all-inclusive bits you may have missed:

• Lucy called the move 'shrewd and bold' in her editor's note for the mag
• Tui UK/Ireland comms director Christian Cull told us the company is 'as committed to sustainability as ever' after readers and pundits raised concerns about the effect of all-inclusives on local economies. (Here's Tui Group's board statement on sustainability.)

WorldHum has a whimsical piece on 'Post-Trip Funk', which I was discussing with a fellow holidaymaker less than a month ago as we taxied forlornly back to Gatwick North Terminal.

That 'PTF' is an act of grotesque self-pity, and is best treated by a slap round the chops, is by the by - people still feel it, and it's still a need state. Marketers know about it, and about the attendant desperation to get your next trip in the diary.

As a party of skiers/snowboarders we were likely to repeat the same category of trip next year, and that makes us a particularly tempting target - we got 'See-you-next-time?' emails within a few days of coming home.

But there are other approaches for other types of business. Both the conversation and the WorldHum article reminded me of this throwaway detail from a story about members of Elite's Ethos luxury division 'getting creative' during the worst of the downturn:

I arrange many group cruises and would normally give them a bottle of wine. However, this time I ­arranged for a 'welcome home' carrier bag containing milk, bread, butter, eggs, tea and coffee. The response I received was phenomenal. (Marion Owen, owner of Marion Owen Travel.)

I don't know if that'd cure my Post-Trip Funk, but it's great relationship-building. I remembered it 12 months later, and all I did was read the story...

Holiday Options has gone bust, and some of the reaction we've started to see testifies to the esteem in which the operator was held by agents.

This is just to aggregate some of the tweets I've spotted - I'm not using a feed as the keyword  'Holiday Options' is likely to pull in a lot of generic travel posts.

Holiday Options has gone bust. Shame.
@lisaminot

RT @lisaminot Holiday Options has gone bust... shame > Agree. They had nice program 2 interesting dests like Croatia, Azores, Slovenia, etc
@alastairmck

bit slow on the uptake but just been told Holiday Options has gone into administration. Shame, really nice company.
@steveody

Oh dear, another bites the dust, so sad.
@lynnerosie

"A big shame about Holiday Options, many satisfied customers over the years. Who now for Croatia? Not many specialists left to sell"
@selectworld

"Can anyone say what's happening with Hidden Croatia? ... Sad, as both v nice to deal with"
@catherinemurp

"Sad about Holiday Options failure, I quite liked them"
@juliedurrans

"Can't believe that Holiday Options has gone under!"
@baldwinstravel

Parts of Asia enjoyed a long total eclipse last night, and readers of the travel media may remember months and months of ads pushing the event - for specialists such as Wendy Wu, which registered chinaeclipse.com as a dedicated eclipse tours website, this was a nice selling point.

So when is the next bankable total eclipse? With ocean covering 70% of the Earth's surface, landfall can be scarce, and even when it happens isn't always in an attractive destination.

Here's a quick map and list. Locations and times are for places that will see the total eclipse, and the map is a sketch - click each line for a link to precise details from NASA.

View Total eclipses 2009 - 2019 in a larger map

2010: Southern Chile and Argentina, 2-3 minutes

2012: The tips of Queensland and the Northern Territory, 2-3 minutes

2015: Faroe Islands and Svalbard archipelago, 2-3 minutes

2016: Parts of Indonesia, 2-3 minutes

2017: Central US, 2-3 minutes (the only eclipse of 2009-2019 in which the point of Greatest Eclipse is on land - it falls in the south of Kentucky)

2019: Central Argentina, 2-3 minutes

So which ones do you think have most potential for attracting travellers from the UK? Australia, Indonesia and the US?

Homepage pic: Top Photo Group / Rex Features

Pumpkin Tours, for this Hungarian Grand Prix deal:

Planning to leave your lady at home while you escape for a boy's weekend? Think again.

Pumpkin Tours is offering a female-friendly package to tie in with The Hungarian Grand Prix.

Every man who books a Hungarian Grand Prix package with Pumpkin Tours receives one free trip to bustling Budapest for their partner.

B1G1F! The offer runs from Monday 13 to Monday 20 July, and is limited to the first 40 customers.

Here's a flickr pic of Jenson Button celebrating first place at last year's event:

For a few days I've been mulling over whether we can do a travel spin on the expenses row engulfing MPs.

No need. Along comes advenutre company Exodus with a great take on it: it has press-released a list of extraordinary expense claims made by its guides over 35 years of operation.

Topical, fun and does a great job of brand reinforcement - it positively screams 'spirit of adventure'.

Here are some highlights:

Nepal, 1999: Glossy receipt ($30.00) produced by high alpine Maoists for their 'protection' over trekking groups in the high Himalaya, signed, dated and stamped. (now framed at HQ) Paid.

Zimbabwe/Botswana border 1995: Pay off to border prison officer to release guide from jail (incarcerated because his engine number didn't match that on the yearly passage du carnet) $130, receipt written on back of prison library ticket. Paid

Uzbekistan 1993: To get trekking group to new starting point a helicopter pilot was located and paid ..... in vodka, bought draft in Moscow (500 Roubles) and put in two litre lemonade bottles. Simple supermarket receipt for vodka. And Lemonade. Vodka paid, lemonade declined.

Sri Lanka 2003 : £40 for new Nokia phone stolen by curious Langur monkey on Sigiriya Rock. Not to be confused with the Blue Monkeys stealing guide's camera at 3700metres on descent of Mt Kenya with her summit photos. Camera (£279.00, film £4.95 ASA100) and phone both paid.

Nepal 1978: Thatching, Pokhara. Three overlanders slept on the flattish roof of local villagers. Roof collapsed involving no hi jinks, it was claimed. New roof $28.00. Paid.

I'm just using this post to reproduce a comment I made on Travel Rants' 'ban fam trips' post, which looks set to go down as one of Darren's most provocative.

Both Kevin (Travolution) and I have been involved in the discussion over there, and our rival TTG has produced a news story and a comment from editor Lucy Huxley about the post.

So:

...I'm all for the industry being conscious of how it appears to consumers, and it's good that we're able to come here and make our case to a largely consumer audience.

The thing I'd want to get across is that fams and biz trips aren't a separate entity that has nothing to do with the wider market - you can't put them in a box and say they're bad, but consumer travel is good.

As one of the industry's most important marketing and research tools (and here industry = tourist boards, agents, operators, airlines, the lot) fams are crucial to how leisure travel is packaged and sold to consumers.

Chances are the hotel you book or the excursion you go on are available because someone - the agent who sells it to you and/or a representative of the operator who provides it - scoped it out on a fam. And as the folks above say, in that context there's no substitute for first-hand experience.

I mean what I say in the first paragraph - these discussions can be frustrating to those who work in the industry, but to some extent they represent the perception of consumers.

It would be a mistake to reject them because they aren't written by insiders, and it's good that most of the comments have focused on explaining the fam trip model rather than having a go at Darren.

As for the comments themselves, Gavin 'Joe Blogs' Boswell was first in, with good follow-ups from Kelly 'Sandwagon' Pipes, Murray 'Advantage member' Harrold and Nick from Broadland Travel.

Update: According to Hitwise, traffic to the Goldtrail Holidays website doubled yesterday, reaching similar figures to the January peak booking period.

That throws into sharp relief the importance of having a response online - the operator gave statements to Watchdog, but that's just the inner ring of a big ripple effect...

Last night's Watchdog will have made uncomfortable viewing for Goldtrail Holidays (watch the report on the BBC site).

A group of complainants - one of them, irony of ironies, a health and safety officer - claimed hotels they booked through the Turkey specialist were dirty and dangerous.

One customer claims Goldtrail responded to his complaint with comments about Turkey being a 'third world country', an allegation which didn't go down terribly well with the Turkish tourist board.

A caveat: a TV report can only ever cover a fraction of a company's customer base. According to Watchdog's own report, the operator carried 250,000 to Turkey last year, and it pointed out in a statement that the vast majority have not made complaints.

Still, there have been problems enough for ABTA to get involved. Frances Tuke came on to talk about measures against the operator - it was fined £11k last year, and, according to Tuke, faces being barred if it doesn't make improvements.

Goldtrail's website is was down for maintenance today this morning, which invites the obvious question: how do brands go about responding to publicity like this?

If you're following the Activities Abroad 'chav' saga you'd be forgiven for thinking travel and class fell out of the sky yesterday.

But it's a bit more complex than that, as the long-standing term 'first class' suggests.

In the early days of commuter travel (and until well into the 20th century), 'first class' and 'middle class' were near synonyms.

Now both rail and air travel operate on broadly the same model, where first is for the business aristocracy - uber-successful but traditionally middle class people who earn more than proper bluebloods.

Meanwhile plumbers, whose manual job makes them traditionally working class, earn more than most of the supposedly middle class office workers who employ them - and both sit in economy.

So much for the phrase 'middle class', now only employed, as by Activities Abroad boss Alistair McLean in a comment on travel blog A Different Voice, as a kind of Daily Mail-ish synonym for 'well behaved'.

It helps to factor in major shifts in average income and buying behaviour that have taken place since class structure's rigidity went to hell in the mid-1900s.

Here's a rough outline:

• Travellers were long segregated according to class, with segregation enforced by income
• Travellers are now more likely to be segregated according to their interests, with segregation driven by choice

The question of interests becomes crucial when group travel is involved. I was once part of a press group on a Rhone river cruise, and two of us were well below the average passenger age. That made some passengers visibly uncomfortable, and I perfectly understood why.

In fact, the base insight Activities Abroad seems to have worked from - that travel is an emotional purchase, and marketers do well to play to consumers' self-definition - isn't wrong.

No, all the operator got wrong was the tone, the language, and the century.

Finally, it's a big lesson on the danger of shock or tongue-in-cheek tactics: if you end up being the bad guy, you just give someone else - like Travel Republic - a chance to ride to the rescue.

Update: A friend read this as a defence of AcAb's email. It isn't. I'm just trying to diagnose what I think they were trying to do and where it went wrong.