“The battle of knowledge vs. information is a significant one for tour operators”

Interview #5 with Justin Wateridge, Managing Director of Steppes Travel

About Justin Wateridge: As the managing director of Steppes Travel, Justin oversees all aspects of one the UK’s premier luxury tour operators. Prior to Joining Steppes Travel in this role, he held a similar position at Abercrombie & Kent UK. He holds a degree in Modern History from the University of Oxford.

About Steppes Travel: Founded in 1989, Steppes Travel is a leading luxury tour operator located in the UK and working with both British and American clientele. They specialise in leveraging deep expertise to build fully customisable tours regardless of how remote or exotic the destination.

Turbulence: Tell us a bit about yourself. How did you wind up in travel and as the Managing Director at Steppes Travel?

Justin Wateridge: I grew up in Zambia, surrounded by stunning nature and a starkly different culture than we have here in the UK. After finishing my university studies, I took up a job in London in the city. While I was enjoying my time there, I wasn’t very inspired by my work.

Looking for a change, I saw an advertisement to take people on group trips to China, applied for it and got the job. I did that for about six months, and I loved it so much that I continued working for that company for more than four years, taking trips to different parts of the world, even meeting my wife during this time.

After a while, we realised that it was time to stop being ‘Peter Pan’ so I found a job in Steppes Travel. Other than a brief stint working Abercrombie & Kent UK, I’ve spent my professional career at Steppes.

The UK market is notoriously competitive. How do you convey your value proposition to your clientele and target audience, especially given that technology is making consumers more autonomous, preferring to arrange travel on their own?

From my perspective, it goes down to the team you use to power your product. First, you need to make sure that you have the right mix of people. While they, of course, need to be experts in their product, it’s more important how they project their passion for travelling and their ability to craft memorable experiences.

Of course, anyone can independently book a trip to practically anywhere in the world — today’s technology allows us to do that. What technology doesn’t let the individual traveller to do is to have immediate access to the on-the-ground connections, expertise, and idea generation that tour operators like ourselves have.

Say, for example, that you’re going to the Taj Mahal in India. You can book a guided tour with just about anyone. However, what we can provide isn’t only a guide but an expert storyteller who is enriching the overall experience of visiting one of the most iconic places on the planet.

This situation goes down to a significant issue that I see in the travel industry today, which is the battle of information vs knowledge. As a tour operator, our well-curated knowledge sometimes gets lost in this wealth of information and people tend to falsely compare the two, thinking they can find this expertise themselves online.

So sometimes, people will go out to a far-flung destination with false information that they mistake as knowledge, leading them to get into trouble to one degree or another; be it getting ripped off or having their plans turn out radically different than expected. Unfortunately, I think we’ll see these sorts of cases more and more. For us as tour operators, we need to not only display this difference to our clients but also put it to good use when we build our packages and give tours.

Additionally for us, once we have a client, we give them access to a private portal that lets them both fine-tune their trip beforehand as well as an app that they can use while travelling to have their journey at their fingertips. So put together, these components help us sell the fact that travelling with a tour operator is well worth it in comparison to “going it alone.”

Steppes Travel primarily creates luxury, tailor-made holidays across the globe. What are the operational challenges in building each trip from “scratch?”

The most prominent challenge that we have are the airlines. It’s the part of the trip that we have the least control of and where they can have the most significant impact on the overall voyage. This effect is even more pronounced when we’re flying our clients to more exotic destinations where air services are limited. One delay, which we have almost no control of, can force us to rebuild an entire itinerary on the fly.

That said, we put a lot of emphasis on building customised tours, so we feel quite comfortable taking on any challenging request.

So say, I came up to you and said “I want to go to East Timor because no one’s going there and it seems interesting. How can we make that happen?”

I don’t think it would pose such an issue. We have region-specific experts for every corner of the globe meaning that we’re ready for these challenges (and I think some of our staff probably enjoy it). Of course, it also goes down to the relationship we have with the client. If they’re a repeat customer or we know them previously, we’ll be a bit more willing to try something way out of the ordinary.

Bringing up the “B-word,” how are you preparing for Brexit? And how do you see Brexit impacting British tour operators?

Aside from the political impacts and the general uncertainty, there’s been more tangible impacts regarding costs. From a financial point of view, travel to outside of the UK has become more expensive since our expenses to suppliers have gone up on average of 10%. This rise is mostly thanks to the exchange rate volatility Brexit has caused.

We recently spoke with a Paris-based Tour Operator who caterers to the French market. We asked them what our readers should know about French travellers. What can you tell us about British travellers? What particularities are their particularities? What are the do’s and don’ts when it comes to working with them?

The peculiarities of UK clients centre around attention to detail and being particular about what they want.

In general (and this is a question we’re asking all of our interviewees), what do you see as the biggest challenge facing tourism and the travel industry today?

Sustainability and environmental impact. We need to make sure that wherever we’re visiting, we’re doing more good than harm, and that can quite literally ruin the experience for the next generation.

I don’t think travel should be elitist, but I think we, as travellers, should pay some form of sustainability tax that goes directly to protecting the local habitat and environment. It’s not fair to anyone — the locals, the visitors, the tour operators and everyone else — that we destroy the precious places that we visit.

Originally published at www.kantox.com on October 27, 2017.