The Fazendin Portfolio’s African Adventure

I came across a few articles in Travel Weekly this week that shed some light on where industry experts think the global travel industry is heading in 2010. I guess it’s that time of year, right? When everyone starts looking to 2010… and to be honest many people in the travel industry will probably be plenty happy to leave 2009 behind.

First of all, for the first time in well over a year, the publicly held travel companies that the magazine follows on a weekly basis (tracking % growth or decline on an annual basis and aggregating that for an industry snapshot of sorts) was up 5.9%. Clearly things were pretty bad this time last year, but at least we’re seeing positive growth numbers vs. the steep declines we’ve seen week on week for the past year.

Next, the magazine spoke to U.S. Travel Association researcher Suzanne Cook, who talked about how it remains to be seen if the current tendency for American consumers to hoard resources (when it comes to travel) will become a permanent normal once the economy recovers. Apparently their research indicated that this mind-set is one that could have staying power, and the travel industry will have to work harder to get consumers to open their pocketbooks. Having said all this, her key red flags were both for the business travel industry and the US in-bound industry. Of leisure travel in general she said, “Leisure is down too, but this is not as urgent. This is the dominant form of travel in the U.S. People love it.” The marketer’s challenge is to have products seen as attractive and valuable, she said.

Leisure travel will ultimately benefit in 2010 from its “very positive perception in consumer minds… there will be pent up demand,” she said.

I’ve written about this before, but lucky for us in the African travel industry, African travel is a big ticket trip and one that people are not flippantly going to pass up on if the opportunity presents itself. We should find our industry recovering in 2010, albeit with some “new norms” such as shorter booking lead times, trading down on level of accommodation or cutting days off a trip to save a bit on costs, and perhaps even a consolidation within the African travel industry and stronger definitions of operator, wholesaler, agent, outfitter, etc. ultimately strengthening relationships for the long term.

In the same issue of Travel Weekly, Nadine Goodwin reports that “leisure sales have hit bottom” however industry execs expect “significant discounting to continue through 2010.” Also, whether it’s re-embracing preferred supplier relationships or vetting new supplier partnerships… the message from the travel agent consortiums is clear, now more than ever the supplier relationship will be critical in selling travel and being profitable in 2010. This rings especially loud and clear when it comes to African travel.

So, at The Fazendin Portfolio how are we going to be spending our fall, bearing in mind the emergence of these “new norms” and this cautious optimism for 2010? We will continue to run educational webinars where we can reach out to our industry partners across the US and Canada with ongoing, in-depth product training, we will be attending trade events such as the Adventure Travel World Summit and World Travel Market where we will have a great opportunity to strategize and plan for 2010 and beyond, we will continue to organize itineraries and marketing materials from within our portfolio to provide our travel agent and tour operator partners here in North America easy, useful tools to help close sales, and somewhere in between all that we’ll find time to travel across Africa checking out properties and experiencing destinations to maintain the all-important current product knowledge and insight that is necessary in this amazing world of African travel.

We look forward to working with you, please don’t hesitate to contact us at any time. Here’s to a strong 2010 and beyond!