Customers

We actively seek customer feedback on all aspects of their holiday experience. Customer questionnaires are complemented by other feedback mechanisms to help us analyse the service each customer receives and make improvements where necessary.

In some regions, for example Germany and the UK & Ireland, we run a mystery shopper initiative – known as Sherlock Holmes – which gives customers the chance to turn ‘quality detective’. Those who have travelled with us for three consecutive years, and who have a further booking, are invited to visit their planned destination as an undercover ‘holiday tester’. Popular with the public and the media, this scheme has produced a significant improvement in customer loyalty.

Here are some of the highlights of our 2008 customer feedback across the Group:

Northern Europe
Last year 85% of respondents said they would travel with us again and 97% would recommend us.

We are complementing our customers' questionnaires with online discussion forums to elicit selected customers' views on service, hotel and destination choice, as well as occasional Gallup research information that measures trust and satisfaction with our brands.

For the past couple of years Northern Europe has been working on a major customer relations management programme based on building a databank with a complete history of all clients. Drawing on this data, we can then treat, serve and communicate with our clients in a more personal way, based on their preferences and earlier history. The whole programme covers the way we relate to customers pre-sale, during the sale, at the resort and after they return – and makes extensive use of online communication. Other projects within the programme include text messaging overseas and customer loyalty rewards.

Continental Europe
In Germany our customer satisfaction surveys include the Customer Satisfaction Monitor – a quarterly survey across all our Germany-based Thomas Cook brands, and Customer Barometer – an independent annual benchmark survey. Figures have improved compared to last year.

North America
The customer satisfaction rating for our mainstream product in Canada – Sunquest – rose by 2% during 2008 to 93%. At the same time customer complaints were significantly down.

Thomas Cook Canada's continuous popularity with customers is also reflected in the long string of awards they won in 2008. Among them are: Consumers' Choice awards for Sunquest as best tour operator in Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary, Winnipeg and Edmonton; and Belair Travel for best travel agency in Toronto.

In order to assess our management of customer complaints, we measure the percentage reduction in complaints year on year. We also respond to complaints quickly, fairly and at the first attempt, providing reassurances of improvements to prevent recurrence.

Northern Europe
Complaints are handled electronically through our single-view web programme which gathers all complaint information and associated costs from all resorts. This enables us to analyse trends and monitor improvement. The complaint rate for last year was 2.2% of customers.

Continental Europe
In Germany our highly-structured complaints management system is designed to highlight the customers' view of our strengths and weaknesses. It also helps in the swift resolution of complaints. Customers can also telephone to lodge an individual complaint.

In 2007 Thomas Cook Germany became the first company to gain the TUV (Technical Control Board) award for service quality and the ISO 10002:2004 certification for complaint management. We retained both these awards in 2008.

We comply with the relevant financial protection arrangements in the jurisdictions where we operate. Our UK customers are protected under several statutory and voluntary schemes.

Flight based holiday arrangements are covered by the Civil Aviation Authority's ATOL (Air Travel Organisers' Licensing) scheme, which includes bonding arrangements and a back-up fund to protect customer prepayments.

To meet our obligations under the EC Package Travel Directive and UK Package Travel Regulations for non flight based holidays, we have bonding arrangements with ABTA (the Association of British Travel Agents). These protect prepayments before people travel, and help bring customers home if they are stranded abroad by the failure of a bonded tour operator.

We're committed to providing equality of access to our flight operations, consistent with what is both reasonable and safe. We approach this obligation positively and are active members of Tourism for All UK, which supports accessibility and social inclusion in tourism.

We engage regularly with the Air Transport Users' Council, the official consumer watchdog, on a wide range of aviation consumer and regulatory issues, directly and through our trade associations.

Through our trade associations we're also represented on the Disabled Persons Transport Advisory Committee. We comply fully with current legislation and adopt suggested best practice guidelines for airlines wherever logistically possible. We continue to work toward compliance with stage two of the EU1107 regulations on Access to Air Travel for Disabled or Persons of Reduced Mobility and will be fully compliant.

In 2005 we became the first major high street travel agent to sell holidays for people with impaired mobility. We work in partnership with a unique operator, Enable Holidays, which specialises in customers with impaired mobility and their friends and family. Endorsed by national disability charity Scope, Enable has hotels in 20 popular overseas holiday destinations which offer exceptional facilities for people with disabilities and combines hotel stays with airport assistance and adapted taxi transfers.

We want to extend good practice safety standards across all Group companies and source markets. Acting as a Group should help to accelerate safety improvements, particularly given our combined influence on suppliers.

During 2009 we will develop good practice guidance for the Group, drawing on best practice within the organisation and recognising that our many source markets are subject to a wide variety of local legal requirements.

Safety in the thousands of hotels and villas we use globally has always been a priority – with particular focus on fire safety, pools, balconies, lifts, glass and general safety around the properties.

As well as meeting local and national safety standards as a minimum, we want suppliers to move towards standards such as those in the 1986 EU Fire Safety recommendations and Federation of Tour Operators (FTO) Codes of Practice. We are also developing procedures for monitoring and managing suppliers involved in independent and online-packaged holidays. In 2009 we will be trialling web-enabled self-assessment protocols to support this.

UK & Ireland
At Thomas Cook UK & Ireland we visit all charter holiday properties in person. Audits carried out by qualified resort and in-house staff cover everything from children's clubs to balcony or swimming pool safety. If there are concerns, we arrange inspections by relevant specialists. Our representatives also carry out regular spot checks on fire alarms throughout the season.

For properties further afield, we sometimes rely on self-assessment. We do, however, visit any high-risk or high-selling properties. And where defects cannot be rectified, we withdraw the property from our holiday programme.

Any properties affected by natural disasters, such as earthquakes or hurricanes, are also checked as being back up to standard and structurally safe before being returned to our programme.

Our Sunwing hotels are monitored by an independent consultancy, checksafetyfirst. Our Sunwing Resort Arguineguin continues to be ranked as one of the best hotels on Gran Canaria and in Spain for pool and food safety.

Our HiHotels in Spain use a third party consultancy, Saniconsult, to monitor food hygiene. It continues to place our Hotel Panoramic in Majorca among the best of the 350 hotels it inspects.

In 2007 MyTravel Airways and MyTravel Aircraft Engineering (MTAE) became the world's first charter airline to gain an internationally recognised safety excellence registration: IATA's Operational Safety Audit.

This covers over 750 standards and recommended practices in aviation safety and operations.

Our own airlines are highly regulated and represent a low safety risk. We have been working with them to develop a protocol for assessing any third party airline that we charter. This will be managed centrally by Group Health and Safety using our own airline staff. It will be further developed to cover aviation risks in resorts, supplementing existing FTO codes on use of balloons, helicopters and light aircraft.

Most of our customers are transported from their arrival airport to their accommodation by third party coach and minibus operators.

As we increasingly utilise the same transport providers in each resort for all Group companies,we will make use of the work already done in the UK to promote the FTO Codes of Practice irrespective of local regulations. This sets out safety standards in areas such as the fitting of seat belts.

As customers demand increasingly adventurous activities and excursions, we need to ensure these are run safely with appropriate licences and insurance.

We have developed audit protocols for a wide variety of excursions which can be used across the Group, particularly as we increasingly standardise on the same suppliers for all Group customers in each destination.

Our specialist health and safety team reviews hygiene and, in addition, we have engaged the help of an external hygiene consultancy on a retainer.

We also work with the FTO and its medical adviser as well as bodies such the Health Protection Agency, UK National Travel Health Network and Centre, World Health Organisation and European Working Group on Legionella Infection to monitor public health issues, advise customers or take appropriate action. Here, too, we will be developing Groupwide policies in 2009.

The safety of children on our holidays is a primary concern. We are working towards meeting UK Ofsted good practice guidance in our DEDICATED KIDSWORLD PROPERTIES, even though these operate in overseas jurisdictions.

Employees who deal with children must have appropriate childcare qualifications and references, and are subject to Criminal Records Bureau checks in the UK.

We have a highly developed child protection policy which staff must follow in the event of any incident occurring involving children overseas.

If customers raise safety issues with us, we follow them up and aim to prevent any recurrence. As well as being good practice, this helps protect us from litigation risk.

Legal obligations vary between source markets, but we will examine the scope for developing common policies and sharing information across the Group on issues that can affect other source market customers.

Customers can support our safety efforts by not putting themselves needlessly at risk.

So we have a comprehensive communication strategy to remind our UK customers to be ‘safe aware’ overseas: we provide information in brochures, with their tickets, inflight and in the resort. We will look to harmonise customer information across the Group this year.

We have a strict procedure that ensures the resort information in our brochures is accurate. Should there be any last minute changes to a customer's holiday we advise them through our ‘errata’ system.

Suppliers to our UK-based operations are all given the FTO Codes of Practice.

We attend and promote FTO health and safety seminars in resorts and also deliver our own seminars in some destinations. The enlarged Group gives us greater scope for doing this, reinforcing our leading position on safety.

The Thomas Cook and MyTravel legacy organisations both used a risk management database system known as PASS.

During 2008 these systems were merged to bring our property portfolio and safety information together on a single central system. We then aim to roll this web-enabled system out to overseas resorts and other source markets to begin building a group database on the properties we use and to monitor their safety status.

We're committed to providing continuing professional development for our health and safety team, and people carrying out work for the Health and Safety department.

We also use consultants where specialist knowledge is required, notably for incident investigation or issues such as legionella or gas safety.

We work with affiliated bodies to ensure that training keeps our staff up to date with the latest changes in legislation.

To protect our customers' welfare and deal effectively with the unexpected, training also includes how to deal with incidents, assaults and evictions.

Continental Europe
Using the latest technology to communicate between head office and our destinations, we train our representatives in customer service, responsiveness and quality. Customer service departments receive training in travel law and we also run quality management seminars.

North America
To strengthen customer service, Thomas Cook North America has given everyone in the business a course based on the principle that we're in the dream-making business. The two-hour interactive workshop entitled Catching the dream teaches that the better we work together across the organisation, the better we'll create memorable holiday experiences. It uses a traditional Native American dreamcatcher as a symbol of how to treat our clients, and one another, with care and respect. An 11-week email campaign supports the workshop by giving every participant tips and tricks on how to implement each of the key learning points in their own work environment.

Catching the dream now forms part of the training for new call centre staff. Our aim is to extend the workshop on a six-monthly basis to all new staff.