Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder.

It's Monday the 23rd of September and I'm in a slightly noisy environment in the city of London

but I have the great pleasure of being with Julia Lobouet Said.

She is Chief Executive of Advantage Travel Partnership and one of the leading voices

in the travel industry. Julia, just remind me how many travel agents you represent?

750 across the UK, Simon.

I'm fascinated by the amount of time in advance people are booking their holidays

we've seen a bit of fragmentation so 50% of everything our members are selling typically now comes within 12 weeks of travel

and actually in August we were seen around the same amount booked for the month of August, which is incredible.

What that has meant, however, in a lot of cases, it's difficult to meet expectations.

So, you know, if you book in advance, typically you will get access to the best deals, the best pricing at the time you want to go, everything that you want.

But leaving it last minute, we can't always meet the expectation of the

clients so how people are booking and for lots of different reasons the time that

they're booking in advance we're definitely seen a shift in that so let me get

this right for your members 750 travel agents are finding that sometimes in this

just this last August last month you had a situation where people

would come into the travel agent and just say, I want to go in a couple of weeks' time,

and they would be expecting your travel agent member to find them something suitable at a very

good price, hopefully a bargain, last minute and all that.

Absolutely. And unfortunately, well, fortunately in a number of cases, we're able, our members

are able to meet that demand. But inevitably, when it's six weeks of the summer holidays,

it becomes exceptionally difficult. And the last thing that any travel agent wants to do is let down

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