MY JOB IS to put together the holiday packages that people want to buy. Basically, I spend my days identifying new locations and designing itineraries. There are so many factors to consider with each tour: weather, opening times, travel distances.
I live in Terenure, in Dublin, which is a 15-minute commute by bike and a 45-minute one by car, so I cycle to work.
I’ll start any time between 8am and 9am if I’m in the office, but I’m very often away, which usually means up at 4.30am for the first flight out.
Travelling is one of the nice parts of my job, but it’s all about quality control, so it’s definitely work, not pleasure.
It means spending a day in Italy, say, checking out existing hotels or looking for new ones, comparing services and standards, and then flying home. It takes a lot of shoe leather.
Another big part of my job is tour-guide selection. The quality of a tour guide can make or break a trip, yet it’s a very under-rated profession. A good tour guide has to be historian, logistics expert, funny, excellent with people and a good speaker. That’s quite a skill set.
Because of the recession people want value for money. What that really means is that they want the same level of quality but want to pay less for it, and the challenge for me is to find ways of helping them do that.
We’re lucky in that we have a very high proportion of repeat customers, but that also means we have to keep coming up with new tours, because they are always keen to try new things from us.
If I’m in the office in Dublin a lot of my day will be spent looking at customer feedback, to see what’s working and what people want more of.
I also spend a lot of my time in meetings with airlines, hotel groups and tourist boards. The aim with all of them is to make sure we are aware of any discounts or promotions they are running.
I also have to make sure they alert us to periods of “distressed inventory”, when maybe the airlines or hotels have surplus capacity. I can then build a package around that which helps us and them.
With tourist boards I’m always negotiating to have them support advertising campaigns.
For lunch I occasionally get brought to nice restaurants by airlines and tourist boards, which is great. The other great thing about the job is that I get great holidays. This summer I’m off to Provence, in France.
By around 6.30pm I’m normally finishing up for the day and getting ready for the cycle home. I’ve two children aged under two, so that looks after my evenings.
Brendan Breen is product manager at the Travel Department
In conversation with Sandra O’Connell