Continental Tours Too Cheap
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Says a Special Correspondent Price-cutting Re du c e s Standard of Service on European Holidays and Discourages Repeat Visits
URING the past 10 years British tourists have sought the sun farther and farther afield, with the result that travel agencies have proliferated. The inclusive-tour business has enjoyed a boom. Currency restrictions, which have varied almost from year to year, seem to have had little effect on progress.
Since the war a new clientele has caused expansion in every _kind of transport interest, especially aviation, but also coach operation. Coaching on the Continent has become almost a new industry.
It seems that many of the new travellers do not care to be initiated into the ways of the Continent of Europe unless guarded by Englishspeaking couriers, protected by agents with British addresses and (sometimes) transported in coaches bearing familiar home-town markings. And why should they? They pay the money: they can dictate the system.
Just how many holidaymakers from the United Kingdom go coach touring on the Continent every year is not known. No statistics appear to be centrally maintained, nor has anybody calculated precisely the total number of coaches operated by the many companies doing this class of business..
Keen Competition
A supplement on coach touring pubiished recently by a travel trade journal includes 40 closely printed pages of tour programmes planned this year by more than 30 concerns in the United Kingdom. This is by no Means exhaustive of the total number of organizers competing for the patronage of all classes.
A senior travel executive, who has made an adroit sidestep. from the Continental coaching business because current trends seriously alarmed him, told me that most coach passengers are first-time tourists—and of these many turn out to be last-time coach tourists!
Why is this? I think the answer is shouted loudly from the programmes. Switzerland, for example, is not an inexpensive country, yet a fortnight's holiday there is offered by coach operators for £30 and even less. An added lure is a quick look at Belgium, France and Germany on the way!
I also observe that rather longer than a fortnight's vacation can be taken in Florence, Rome, Capri, Venice and a number of other glamorous centres, all in the course of one coach ride, for about £70. Everything • is found—transport. accommodation, all meals and tips, and couriers. D28 In fact, all the companies, newcomers as well as old-established ones, who have had to join in the rush or go out of business, have competed bitterly with each other in cutting prices. Each successive season it appears that the' absolute limit in cheapness has been reached: then some ingenious fellow discovers how to cut a few centimes here and a few groschen there and triumphantly announces an all-time low-priced Grand Tour of Europe.
1 say it is -lime somebody called a halt. Not that the customers have failed to get value for money. There is no doubt that for the most part they have got every penny's worth out of their extremely modest fee.
The trouble is that they have not been charged enough to allow for a reasonable holiday—and are not sufficiently experienced to know what a reasonable Continental holiday is. No wonder that so many declare, after one strenuous and perhaps slightly sordid Continental coach tour, that in future it will be Bridlington or Blackpool for them.
Fleeting Glimpses
Look at a typical programme—not, I hasten to add, any particular company's programme. Let us suppose Italy is the goal. The brochure promises a sight of, perhaps, four or five countries there and back, plus second-class hotels and so on.
The shortest route is perforce followed—not necessarily or usually the most .picturesque. Hotels and restaurants en route have all long before been bargained with. They supply meals and beds at cut prices (which is reasonable as the customers are also paying cut prices, although they probably don't realize it) and, of course, are by the same token compelled to cut service and food to the barest minimum.
In the larger establishments coach tourists are usually segregated and their " special " treatment is carefully concealed from, the local customers— it has to be, otherwise the restaurateur, or hotelier, is liable to lose his valuable local reputation.
Segregation is not the lot of second
class passengers only. First-class tours are also cut-price, although, again, value is, as a rule, commensurate with the total paid.
In a leading Milan hotel I recently witnessed the arrival of a first-class British coach tour. The name of that famous establishment on the company's brochure would most certainly attract even experienced Continental travellers.. It is celebrated throughout Europe for food, wine and service.
What the coach tourists had no way of knowing in advance was that they would dine apart in an obscure corner of the dining room, that the menu provided would be by no means an example of the local cuisine, let alone the one this fine hotel provides for its daily customers, and that the number of waiters allocated to them would be exactly half that deemed necessary for the "regulars." They received "special " treatment—specially bad. But the hotel management was not to blame: they supplied precisely what the tour organizer paid for. And the customers got what they paid for, too.
Protect Tourists
In my opinion, first-time coach tourists are entitled to official protection. Other public services emanating from Britain are subject to close scrutiny, sometimes national, sometimes international, or both. Catering in the air is regulated right down to the content of the sandwiches served to " economy-class " paSsengers.. The size of each seat is worked out to the inch. The Board of Trade has a big say in shipping matters.
And, of course, the Traffic Commissioners purport to. control Continental coach touring. But do they? Is any care taken by Authority to determine whether services are really necessary—whether coach tours to, say, Switzerland from Britain are now so numerous that the various organizers can get business only by cutting their prices to the point of the ridiculous?
Are the British authorities scrutinizing the system with sufficient interest? Or, perhaps, do they lack the knowledge of Continental conditions to ensure that the fees charged . are sufficient to give the passengers what they think they are going to get—a genuine glimpse of Continental life, of the people, of the food and drink?
These are questions to which the travelling public is entitled to an answer. The Association of British Travel Agents might also think, it worthwhile to listen in.