As this Travelweek story notes, “evidence of the newest threat to the Canadian retail travel sector is probably right in your own wallet. It’s your Costco membership card.”
The headline for this edition of ‘It Happened This Week’ is: ’A lifetime’s supply of ketchup – and a trip? Costco Travel’s alleged extreme rebating is the latest headache for agents’
Travel advisors have dealt with a litany of competitors over the decades – all the way back to suppliers ‘going direct’ with 1-800 numbers, and more recently, to the Internet and OTAs starting in the mid-1990s and beyond.
Over the past several years, Costco’s alleged extreme rebating has caused an uproar with traditional travel advisors, and rightly so. As this Travelweek story notes, one agency exec lost a $63,000 Regent Seven Seas booking to Costco Travel, and was at risk of losing a world cruise booking on another cruise line, until they saved it by convincing the cruise line to help share the burden of a US$4,000 rebate.
As the agency exec notes in the article, discounting has been around in the travel industry for years. But rebating “is on the far extreme of discounting”, and extreme rebating “is a not-so-hidden virus.”
Did the headline appear in Travelweek in 1998, 2008 or 2018?
Here’s a hint: Less than two years after this story ran, travel agents found themselves staring down a brand-new threat: the COVID-19 pandemic.
Fill out the contest form below, with your guess and your email address. We’ll announce the answer and the winner next week, along with the next contest headline. Last week’s contest headline about Royal Caribbean’s Quantum of the Seas ran in November 2014. Our winner for Week #39 is Ange Fuller with Those Who Wander Travel Service in Saint John, NB. Congratulations Ange!
Every Wednesday in Travelweek Daily, we’re posting an article from Travelweek’s archives, spanning the years 1973 – 2023. Guess the correct year the story ran, and you could win a $50 Amazon gift card. There’s a new headline and a new chance to win every single week.
