Luxury Holidays — SME Case Study (UAE)

Luxury Holidays – “Travel around the world from your destination of choice” Chris Jones

For some of us, we think traveling has happened only for the past few decades, however, the truth is, people have been traveling for centuries. Wealthy citizens of ancient Rome traveled from the heart of the empire to their summer villas along the Mediterranean, kings and queens of medieval Europe traveled either to relax at their multiple palaces or to forge alliances, and the Silk Road of ancient China and hajj of the Muslim World to Mecca. Traveling has always been enjoyed by the ancients and the modern people, either to relax or enjoy the scenery, or for business and networking.

Some countries are considered as centers of finance, tourism, and business. People from all over the world flock to these countries to find better working conditions and Chris Jones Luxury Holidays – “Travel around the world from your destination of choice” go on leisure vacations, giving birth to traveling agencies and package tours. The history of the travel agency can be traced back to Robert Smart, who in 1822, declared himself as a steamship agent and his first operation was to book passengers on steamers to various ports in the Bristol Channel and in Dublin, Ireland. From then on, countless travel agencies sprouted from all parts of the world, offering domestic travel and international luxury packages.

Luxury Holidays was founded in 2019 by its leader and owner, Syed Mahboob, who has 20 years of experience in the travel industry handling various roles and responsibilities. Luxury Holidays is a travel agency that offers all travel related services, from airline bookings to travel packages for corporate and leisure travels.

The travel agency was established with a purpose of taking advantage of the UAE’s huge travel and tourism industry market. As a cosmopolitan and open country in the Middle East, the UAE has attracted tourists and job seekers from around the world. And as such, the travel

agency’s mission are as follows

¡ Aims to provide customers with efficient service.

¡ Aims to meet the demands of customers.

Vision ¡ To make travel easy for our customers.

¡ To increase collaboration with corporate companies to cater to their business travels.

Organizational Structure

Luxury Holidays is a small enterprise founded by Mahboob in 2019 to cater to customers looking for reasonably priced travel packages and tours. The company has a lean organizational structure wherein it focuses more on customer value while utilizing fewer resources. In this structure, the members of the organization put their priority on the customer and every decision that an organization makes involves assessment on how it will affect their customers.

As a small enterprise, Luxury Holidays is composed of the founder and owner acting as the overall administrator and manager, three travel agents, one accountant, one cashier, and one office clerk.

Founder & Owner The Organizational Structure Travel Agents Accounts & Cashiers Office Clerk Figure 37: The Organizational Structure of Luxury Holidays Services Offered As a fairly new and relatively small travel agency based in Al Ain, Luxury Holidays provides similar services as its more established counterparts in the city. It offers individual airline bookings and travel and tour packages as well as corporate travels for business or leisure. By prioritizing its customer value, the company plans and decisions are always assessing the impacts to its customers, which appeals to its existing customers thus giving them referrals.

Strategies Based on the interview with the founder and owner of Luxury Holidays, the company has a simple strategy in promoting the travel agency.

Al Ain is home to a number of expat populations, thus, there is a need for travel agencies to cater to their needs for travel bookings. In order to grab the opportunity offered by the travel sector, Luxury Holidays’ business

strategy is simple

¡ This is to provide seamless customer experience while improving business profitability.

By providing seamless customer experience, customer satisfaction is a priority hence business profitability can be achieved.

Happy and satisfied customers can definitely provide profits to any business, and it is especially true when the business is in the travel industry sector. Customers of Luxury Holidays are happy and satisfied with the services

provided by the agency. For its marketing strategy

¡ The agency employs a push and pull strategy, where in theory, a company is pushing its products to its customers while at the same time, pulling these customers to the product.

¡ The agency also employs digital marketing strategies in order to gain more customers online.

These marketing strategies are being achieved by the agency through its highly trained and customer-friendly agents.

The operational strategy of the agency is being enhanced through the use of third-party or external technology partners. By employing a third-party partner for their technology needs, it ensures that the operational flow is effective and efficient and more enhanced than some of its counterparts.

Since the agency’s inception, the ethos of its strategies and business structure have gained loyal customer following and can be credited to its growth as a company and helped it to constantly improve customer-oriented services.

The travel industry in the UAE has been tremendously affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. Even now, it is reeling from the effects of lockdowns and quarantines happening from other countries from around the world.

However, due to these strategies being ingrained in the agency, the company sales almost reached pre-COVID levels.

Challenges The market for travel and tourism in the UAE is dynamic and competitive. Owing to its strong image of inclusiveness and tolerance, the UAE has enjoyed being the top destination for travel and leisure among the GCC countries.

For small travel agencies, the challenges to remain operational is a constant reminder of the competitiveness in this market. The challenges faced by Luxury Holidays

are as follows

¡ Competitiveness in the industry ¡ Lack of online presence ¡ Credit challenges in the market ¡ Changing customer behavior ¡ Shrinking profitability due to online transparency In order to resolve these challenges, Luxury Holidays

amended its business processes and strategies

¡ The customer-centered service gave the travel agency a loyal customer base ¡ Improve the supply chain ¡ The employment of digital and social media marketing to have an online footprint and presence ¡ Employment of third party technology support Best Practices As a travel agency, the Luxury Holidays staff always give its best effort in catering to customers. These are the

best practices highlighted by the agency

¡ Providing customer support 24/7 to customers, which is essential to the industry nowadays.

¡ Creating long-term partnership with suppliers.

¡ No/Strict credit policy which has helped the profitability of the company.

¡ Good compensation for employees to maintain good morale and ensure productivity.

Failures Although the travel agency is new, it has come to realize that some of its practices before contributed staff turnover and loss of profitability.

¡ Initially, the agency offered credit for its services, which led to loss of profits, thus driving the management of the agency to implement a no credit policy.

¡ Neglecting employees’ effort to increase sales and presence of the agency. Today, the agency has a policy to give incentives to its employees who reached their quota.

From Beginning to Present Day The travel agency was founded in 2019 by Syed Mahboob. It started with only two travel agents which included Syed, who was also acting as the cashier and the accountant.

Today, the travel agency employs three travel agents, an accountant, a cashier, and an office clerk. It is a fairly small business enterprise, but it performed well before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, which resulted in the closure of some of the more established travel agencies and agencies similar to its size.

The COVID-19 pandemic redefined the health and safety protocols in the agency, and the management of Luxury Holidays has made necessary arrangements to adhere to them.

The focus of the study is the introduction and analysis of the company with emphasis on how the strategies implemented by a small travel and tours service company helped it to overcome the challenges of competition and effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. It is recommended that a further analysis of these strategies must be conducted in order to apply this to other service oriented companies in different sectors.

It is also recommended that additional study must be conducted to measure the ability of the travel agency to cater to its loyal customers in relation to profitability as claimed by the owner during the interview. This is to ensure that by adhering to a leaner organizational structure is advantageous compared to a more traditional one.

Conducting this study is enlightening on my part as a researcher, because the travel industry has been greatly affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.

¡ The spread of the COVID-19 pandemic has devastating effects in all sectors of business but most especially in the travel industry. The resilience and innovative approach done by companies to ensure their survival greatly affected the fate of their company.

¡ Much like humans, businesses also adapt to the new normal. By employing technology to promote their business, it has helped them to reach almost pre-COVID levels of profits and sales.

Luxury Holidays is a service-based company with a focus on providing travel oriented services. The company’s goal is to make travel easy for its customers. The advent of COVID-19 pandemic has made the travel industry reeling from its knees due to lockdowns and community quarantines around the world.

However, despite these circumstances, implementation of effective policies and strategies can be crucial for the survival and profitability of a company. The strategies implemented by Luxury Holidays have kept the effects at bay and kept them profitable.