A tour operator creates and operates a holiday package including a combination of flights, hotels, transfers, excursions, tours, attraction tickets and insurance. In the case of a larger tour operator, this may mean that have their own aircraft or other transportation services, their own hotels, and/or their own ground staff.

Tour operators are responsible for the fine detail of the operation of travel arrangements and have a defined duty of care towards the travel agents and their clients. Tour Operators are often referred to as ‘wholesalers’.

The reason tour operating began was to offer packages to untouched parts of the world. The layman didn’t have access to make arrangements in less well-known areas of the world. In today’s world we have the internet and so the world has become very small and incredibly accessible. However, there is a bigger demand for niche tour operators today than ever before.

The travel industry is one of the fastest growing industries in the world and travel is now seen as a necessity in people’s lives, especially millennials. Niche tour operators offer some fabulously unusual trips such as seeing orangutans in Borneo to driving holidays in Albania to photography tours in the North Pole – every corner of the world can be discovered. It is an incredibly exciting time for the tour operator industry. The question may not simply be “what is a tour operator?” – it may well be “what can a tour operator offer?”

Luxury Consult has decades of experience in this industry segment and can help TourOperator partners with:

• Strategic Planning
• Identify and define Market strategy
• Channels to Market
• Operational Planning
• Hotel Contracting
• Third Party Ground Service Contracting
• Package Design
• Asset Management
• Technology & Systems
• Training
• Analysis of Direct vs Third party contracting
• Operating Procedure Setup
• Complaint and Incident Handling
• Fam Trip Optimization
• Legal
• Health and Safety
• GDPR Compliance