Sponsored Interview: Saga Travel on leadership, its new mentality, and new tech partnership

Kate Harden-England peeped behind the curtain of Saga Travel’s recent move to Sabre and its success

Saga Travel has been through waves of changes, starting during the pandemic, when Titan Travel and Saga Holidays were still run separately.

Since then, the group has been busy. It appointed John Constable as CEO of Titan Travel, and went on to merge the operations of its two brands into one entity, Saga Travel Group. 

This, it said, was to allow them to work more effectively together while remaining distinct brands to the customers.

For Constable, bringing together the operations of the two brands has proved very beneficial.

“It was a real highlight to see the team flourish in that environment, continuing to grow the customer base, and seeing the teams believe that they can deliver growth opportunity for the segment,” he said.

That, alongside the team’s “laser focus” on the segment, and the changing of products to accommodate and attract different levels of demand, he lists as his key takeaways from the first couple of years leading the business.

It wasn’t without its challenges, though. Constable recalled: “We certainly had a pinch point. 

“We had to navigate very quickly through some challenges with contact centres, and we navigated through that in a number of ways, with our websites, online communication, and actually new contact centres as well, which we spun up to cope with demand but that was a very challenging operational period coming out of the pandemic.”

The period of change at Saga with the coming together of two different sets of colleagues meant there was a need for them to be “brave and to innovate”, Constable said.

A new mentality was key to the first chunk of Constable’s tenure, as he said the business needed to change the way it thought about what is was offering its customers as well as what it offered them.

This spurred a new era for the company. Constable said: “We needed new products, new ways of working, new technologies, and new pricing methodologies”.

The need to move away from two reservation platforms, with two relationships at play, to a “seamless experience in one single platform” was pertinent for sustained operations.

In 2023, Saga Travel set the wheels in motion to make the move to Sabre Corporation as its new connectivity partner, to power all its air content, while it explores hotel content too.

Constable said: “Being an organisation that was going to multiple platforms to get content, having an offering that actually gave us a consolidated place to go for full-service, low-cost carriers and all the UK low-cost carriers that we needed, available in one platform, meant it became a seamless operation for us driving productivity for our contact centre agents.”

“We really loved that Sabre were excited about our segment. 

“Our segment being not only individual travel, but group travel, and that comes with a number of frictions, particularly when you're dealing with third parties or airlines and having to get messages across, with customers want to manage their bookings and do things with the airlines. 

“So, Sabre was really quite excited about helping us give a better customer journey in that space.

“If you take a business like ours on Sabre, we're heavily weighted towards British Airways but use all the low-cost carriers, and multiple ways of connecting to that. 

“Sabre gives us low-cost carrier content at the lowest fare structure we can get and connectivity of a level that we need with all the full-service carriers. All in one place. It's just simple. 

When it comes to simplicity, Constable refers to how it affects all aspects of the business. He said: “I talk a lot about our colleague experiences and simplification of productivity, but actually our customer experience is also much simpler because of everything we’re presenting in ‘Manage my Booking’ view and self-service is now all in one place. 

“You’re getting rid of that friction, which I think is hugely important and continues to be a focus.

“I think we chose the right time to [move to Sabre], which was in one of our quieter periods. 

“And then we went into a peak trading period, which gave people a real opportunity to use the system and try it with the support that was provided. 

“There is a change curve that people have gone through. You've got an organisation such as ours, that has used certain technologies for a significant amount of time, and you are changing the hearts and minds of people who know how to drive that technology. But Sabre has as handled that and supported us, collaboratively.”

It hopes the move will see growth and productivity gains with support for the back office, including better automation to drive it through without additional cost or restructure.

The firm has achieved growth in the past couple of years under Constable’s leadership, which he ascribes to a mixture of empowering teams and developing teams around him to “hugely drive value” into the businesses.

This year, the group reported that in 2023 Saga had an “outstanding” year for cruise and touring.

Constable said the success of its touring division in terms of consumer growth, revenue and pricing was ultimately due to it having been “the beneficiary of a complete focus of demand, and a targeted focus”.

It thought about what demand it wanted within the business and how would it convert that. All of which has “really driove a steady growth on all levers”.

Its people play a part in its success. From an equal split between male and female employees, to how it champions age internally in its people - to be reflective of its demographic, including 80% of its drivers being over the age of 50 - is what brings all of its success together.

Constable hopes that now the business is seeing sustainable growth, it can focus on its niche again and go back to its heritage of being the best operator for its target demographic.

“I would like to see significant growth in our holidays business,” he said.

“We are absolutely focused about where we take that and how we've grown back into destinations, such as Spain, Cyprus, the Canary Islands.

“We have significant growth opportunities with destinations and new products like our hosted programme, as we can see the consumer wanting different styles of touring, more adventure, more flexibility. 

“And we see that as a huge opportunity to kind of cement our growth as we go forward.”

With its scope for advancements, it looks like Saga Travel is one to watch for the foreseeable.