Offering added value, unburdening the customer and mainly using the website to direct customers to the stores. It is the strategy that Peter Vroom and Bart Kwaad, the owners of Westbound Travel, have been successful with for years. The recent move to a larger store in Enschede should accelerate growth. An interview. Westbound Travel’s head office is located in the Stadsveld shopping center in Enschede. At the end of December, that head office moved a few buildings to a store that is more than twice as larger. The store is bright and spacious, with separate meeting rooms and destination photos covering an entire wall. The shopping center is located in a suburb of Enschede. The duo Vroom and Evil have deliberately chosen to stay here. “We wanted to move to a larger building, but stay in this shopping center,” says Vroom, who briefly sums up the advantages of the location. Key points are free parking in front of the door and the diverse range of other shops, from Action to a luxury bakery and at least four large supermarkets. “Our regular customers know where to find us. And why would we go to an expensive location in the center of Enschede, where accessibility is much worse? Moreover, since corona, we have only been working by appointment, both for package holidays and for the somewhat complex tailor-made trips. That’s why we don’t have shoppers. Customers don’t have to wait for each other and we have plenty of time for good advice’, says Kwaad. “Partly because of this, we have a high conversion rate. We send a proposal in advance, which customers can use to prepare.’ Vroom mentions another advantage of the old familiar location: just in the neighbourhood, a senior flat has recently been realized, with which the travel agency was able to register many new customers. Westbound Travel has five branches in the region: two travel agencies in Enschede, one in Hengelo, one in Losser and a Group & Business Travel department at the University of Twente, which is also a good business travel customer. With this, Westbound Travel presents itself as the local hero of this part of Overijssel. The move to the new store should ensure growth on location, says Vroom. ‘We want to bring our tailor-made specialists together here. We have separate rooms here with large screens where we can advise customers without others listening in. With this focus on customisation, we expect to increase our turnover considerably.’ Although customisation has an important share in sales, roughly two-thirds of the turnover consists of package holidays. There are also many German tour operators among them, departing from German airports. ‘The latter is out of necessity’, says Kwaad. “None of our customers wants to have to drive to Schiphol for their holiday. We even used to have an office in Nordhorn, just across the border. We offer almost all German border airports. ́ Westbound Travel embraced the internet at an early stage, says Kwaad. “That was in the 1990s, when many travel agencies still saw the internet as a threat. We soon established ties with the first sofa beds and made combinations with separate airline tickets. Internet is a relative term. At the time, a lot of bookings were made via e-mail. Customers would tell friends at a birthday party that they had booked online, while they had just sent an email.’ Westbound doesn’t use online for direct bookings, but to generate traffic to the stores, says Vroom. ‘We don’t have the ambition to become a holiday discounter. By the way, many customers still come in with something they’ve seen on the internet. Then you can dig your heels in and say, book it yourself. Or you can say: just sit down, and we’ll take a look together. It happens often enough that we discourage a trip when we see a better trip for a better price. And the internet doesn’t do that, as our regular customers now realize. And that’s what sets us apart from the pure online players. We are flexible and help the customer choose the right trip. Does he want to make the famous round in the US, but stay longer in some places? Then we’ll do that. Can’t is not an option at Westbound.’ Because ‘can’t’ is not an option, Westbound has stopped traveling on demand. “It is impossible to explain to a customer that he has to wait a long time for an application for three days in Madrid. Then you run the risk that he will book himself. So we’ll take a look ourselves.’ Incidentally, the two travel entrepreneurs are regularly approached about their livelihood at birthdays, parties and celebrations. ‘Does that still exist, a travel agency?’, is a frequently asked question. Evil: ‘I’m not even going to have that discussion anymore.’ Vroom: ‘There are people who go to me on a birthday party and explain in detail how they book their holiday themselves.’ Kwaad: ‘I always make the comparison with odd jobs around the house. I never go to Hornbach, but look for a specialist who can do it for me. I let myself be unburdened. Then I say: you also go to a specialist to book a trip.’ Photo: Bart Evil and Peter Vroom. Read the complete interview with Peter Vroom and Bart Kwaad in this week’s TravMagazine #3.
