PhotoTravel Quality, a new model of Travel Agency.

Times of pandemic, difficult times, time to adapt to the almost daily “new normal”.

But how can a small travel agency survive in the competitive world of the tourism sector during these difficult and turbulent times? There are no magic formulas, behind the scenes there is only work, a lot of previous work.

In the current context, in which the global pandemic has stopped the offer of many of the large tour operators, it has become necessary to design innovative alternatives to adapt to the situation and continue to offer trips to customers. Small businesses have been able to adapt better to this “New Normal”, offering a quality and proximity to travellers that the large multinationals in the sector have not been able to reach.

Small travel agencies have shown muscle, adapting in a short time to the real needs of the market. The proximity to our customers allowed us to know the real needs. The first step was to adapt our service with the new health protocols, adopting measures that improved the confidence of those who travel with us. Then came the economic section, adapting the reservation and refund policy to the real needs of the situation.

From its beginnings, PhotoTravel differentiated itself from the impersonal model of large multinational travel agencies, betting on a sustainable business model in which, in order to offer higher quality and lower costs, we decided to contract our services directly with local suppliers, largely eliminating intermediaries and commission agents.

This has been one of the keys to our current success, another way of traveling, it is possible.

The other, the personalized attention to our clients, not only in the preparation of the trip, but also in the destination, where they are always accompanied, in addition to the local guides, by a member of the PhotoTravel team, which transmits not only proximity, but also security and confidence. Signs of identity that define us and distance us from the model of massified, impersonal, and often unsustainable trips, offered by the large tour operators.

As has always been the case in all crises, ingenuity when creating new ways of selling or communicating with customers is a differentiating advantage. Creativity in this sense is essential. At PhotoTravel we have done our homework and we have gone down the road from offering a product or a service, to currently offering a whole experience, author trips that transcend the limits of the recreational or photographic, with cultural immersions in destinations that very few agencies are able to access.

It is very likely that the low-cost travel model, which is not very sustainable due to its massification and which has been showing signs of exhaustion for some time, has come to an end. With the coronavirus, the cheap and massive has ended, and in the coming years it will not be possible to offer trips at prices as cheap as they have been until now. Travellers are increasingly prepared and demanding, and only agencies that are committed to quality proposals will have a future ahead of them. We have understood this for some time now at PhotoTravel and it is to this reality that we have adapted our decalogue of action and our travel catalogue.