A new venture into the Northern Ireland holiday market for Travel Department has been a success according to Stephen Mills, the UK General Manager for the travel business that specialises in guided group holidays, escorted tours and active and adventure holidays.
The company, founded in Dublin in 1996 and a leading Reader Offer Holiday provider across the UK and Ireland for guided group holidays, has just celebrated its first year for sales via travel agents.
Last year, in a new move for the business, Travel Department began to work with trade partners in Northern Ireland, launching with Barrhead Travel in Belfast and its members including L&J World Travel. This was shortly followed by a partnership with Oasis Travel.
The expertise, customer care and new routes to market that local travel agents offer customers has seen sales surpass expectations, according to Mr Mills.
“We intentionally partnered with a limited number of select travel agents as we did not want to spread ourselves too thinly and to allow for those new agents to get to know our brand, values and product. Our agent partners now have an exceptional holiday product, pricing and destinations available from Belfast and Dublin in GBP.
“We offer 100% price parity ensuring agent partners always have the best price, and we are working strategically on building our agency partnerships across Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK without compromising on the relationships we already have in place. We appreciate and understand the value and service travel agents offer and have seen strong levels of new business being generated.”
Travel Department opened with new agent partners in 2024 selling across the province including Club World Travel, Limavady Travel, Gallagher Travel, Downe Travel, Century Travel and Carefree Travel.
Travel agents working with Travel Department are provided with bespoke marketing and promotional materials as well as regular social media content to differentiate their customer offering.
This travel trade initiative offers Northern Ireland holidaymakers arguably the broadest range of guided group holidays destinations available from their travel agent.
Travel Department’s range of guided group holidays includes river cruises, solo holidays, garden holidays, exotic long-haul trips, city and festive breaks and their new range of Unique Small Group tours, to nearly 200 destinations across the world.
Sister company, and small group adventure specialist, TD Active Holidays offers a variety of wellness and hobby experiences including yoga, photography, walking, and exploration holidays to over 50 destinations, with all holidays now also available via Travel Department’s agent partners.
Everything is included with Travel Department and TD Active Holidays; flights, transfers, accommodation and all are expertly led by local guides. Travel Department’s core range of European destinations includes Italy, Spain, Portugal and Croatia but the company has seen other destinations such as France, Malta and Montenegro performing very well. With long haul destinations, noticeable standouts include India, Canada, South Africa, China and newly launched Korea, all performing strongly.
The business has a leading industry reputation, with a Trustpilot score of 4.7 for holidays, and won the recent publicly voted 2022 and 2023 British Travel Awards for Guided Tours, as well as the 2023 Irish Independent Reader Travel Award for Best Travel Agent/Tour Operator.
