It´s autumn 2023 both my boyfriend Sam and me have a few days off of work together. Sam would like to catch some sun and warmth before the darkness of the winter truly sets in. being November a cruise on the Mediterranean would be a bit too chilly, in Greece most interesting hotels are closed. I was thinking about going to Thailand but flight prices where prohibitively expensive, after consulting a TUI travel agency they recommended us a trip to Punta Cana in the Dominican Republic with an unbeatable price. This would be Sam´s first ever and mine first in a very long time package trip with an all-inclusive hotel.
Most of the time Timothy (and/or Sam) and I plan our trips ourselves and book transportation and accommodation mostly direct with the provider. The last time I booked a “package” holiday from a travel agency was the Caribbean cruise I made with my sister on Norwegian Cruise Line back in 2014, 10 years ago.
At that time I had to tell the people at the travel agency what I wanted. Despite them selling the product, they knew less about it. The worst thing was that I had to tell the people of the Jetair (now TUI) Travel Centre that the options of scheduled flights on Iberia to Miami weren’t the most appealing in time or price and that maybe they would need to look into selling their own flights going to Miami, getting the response “Oh yes, that’s right we fly there ourselves!”.
This encounter didn’t leave me with a lot of confidence in the knowledgeability of travel agents and travel packages. This was the main reason I started planning and booking my trips entirely by myself.
However as we were quite late in booking our autumn getaway, the prices I got for flights and hotels separately where quite extortionate, flights to Thailand retailing at over 1000 euros return per person. This is when I thought that it might be a good idea to take a look at travel agencies and packages holidays as they often offer sharply priced packages.
This time the staff at the TUI travel centre appeared to be much more professional and clearly knowing what they were doing. They advised us that Thailand wasn’t offering the best deals at the time and we might be better off looking towards the Dominican Republic for a our all-in beach holiday, as they had some pretty good deals there.
In the end we settled with a package of TUI Belgium’s luxury selection, VIP Selection, in one of their RIU hotels in Punta Cana. By booking the VIP Selection package we had private airport transfers included (at both ends), priority check-in lounge access in Brussels Airport and seats in the Deluxe (Premium Economy) section of the plane.
Travel agencies and tour operators clearly went along with the time and innovated immensely. TUI now had an app covering everything about your trip, it contained all information about your trip, what you needed and your trip details. Thus negating much of the usual paperwork involved. You could see and book all excursions beforehand, thus no more need to wait for the local rep meeting to get information about excursions or book them.
The app also included all information about the airport transfers including the name and number plate of the taxi you were looking for.
On the single excursion we made our pickup at the hotel was late, but thanks to the in-app chat function we could just text the local TUI reps that where very helpful, a vast improvement over having to call them using expensive international call rates or waiting until they were at the hotel (same goes for any other problems or queries, they could be contacted 24/7).
The travel agents were also very proactive in service they helped step for step making sure the app was correctly setup for all functions, and to see that everything worked and displayed as it should. They also made the seating reservations on the plane for us, so we would be sitting on 2 seats next to window without us having to keep an eye on the deadline. Thanks to them reserving our seats as soon as the reservation window opened we received some very good extra legroom first row seats.
All in all we had a very pleasant experience this time with the TUI travel agency and tour operations. The only bad part of the hotel was the RIU hotel that underperformed, despite it being a RIU Palace it felt more like a 3 to lousy 4 star hotel instead of a premium 5 star offering.
This of course is not fully to blame on TUI as they have little power over the performance of the hotel. While the travel agent booking us was quite pleased with that particular RIU hotel, her experience was dating a few years back. In the meantime the RIU Palace Macao was refurbished and reopened as the top hotel of the location, thus maybe our RIU Palace Punta Cana was downgraded a bit compared to her experience.
We also have become somewhat picky travellers with experiences in some very nice InterContinental, Fairmont and Sofitel hotels and spoiled by the quality cruise lines like Celebrity and Princess Cruises gave us.
This recent experience of TUI did make me rethink my opinion of package holidays and travel agencies and I’m much keener on booking there again in the future if they offer a good package. I will certainly look at their offers more often in the future for future travels.
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