Peter Fankhauser: Cook CEO urges: First put customers in your heart!

Tour operators must stop counting ‘pax’, put customers “in their hearts” and offer authentic emotional experiences in order to stay relevant in the future, according to Thomas Cook CEO Peter Fankhauser, fvw.com reports.

Companies that only try to “catch” customers with pricing will come under massive cost pressure, neglect the quality of their products and lose relevance, he told German travel industry managers in a lively keynote presentation at the fvw Kongress in Essen yesterday. “I’m confident that tour operators will exist in future if they change their business model,” he declared.

Describing the transformation of traditional holiday products, he urged tour operators to stop thinking of customers as ‘pax’ that fill capacity. “It’s not enough to have customer focus in your mind, you have to feel it in your heart.”

There could be “massive consequences” from disappointed customers, especially through social media which are highly trusted and believed by consumers, he warned. Fankhauser mentioned the case of the deaths of two children of Cook customers on Corfu several years ago which escalated massively last year, putting dramatic public pressure on the company.

New added-value products and services

Thomas Cook has now put customers “in our heart” and introduced new added-value products and services to reach individual customer wishes and to improve customer satisfaction, the Swiss-born CEO emphasised. The focus lies mostly on its portfolio of differentiated hotels where it can make improvements faster.

The introduction last year of a ’24-hour satisfaction guarantee’ covering the 1,500 most booked hotels had been a clear success, he said. There had only been 600 complaints out of 3.5 million customers in these hotels, and 70% of the cases had been resolved within 11 hours. The company had only had to hand out nine money-back vouchers and “not a single customer” took up the offer of a flight home. In addition, customer satisfaction with the hotels had increased significantly.

Another example was the launch of the first Casa Cook hotel on Rhodes this year. Bookings and customer satisfaction with the homely rooms and apartments had far exceeded the company’s expectations. “You have the feeling of being at home on holiday. That’s the concept of Casa Cook,” the Cook chief explained.

In contrast, Fankhauser appealed to the German travel industry to “halt the discussion” over the issue of “who owns customer data”, and instead to work together to improve customer experiences. Tour operators, for example, could offer added value such as direct emergency support and help if travel agents forwarded the mobile phone numbers of customers, he pointed out.

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