Gearing up for the Ski Season

We're now putting the finishing touches to our ski schedule for 2008/2009. As ever there are a few imponderables to consider:
1. Will it be a good season for snow?
2. If it is a good season when will it be a good season? 2007/2008 was good because there was early snow which gets people thinking about skiing. What you really don't want is an Indian summer stretching well into October
3. What will happen to the euro sterling exchange rate?
4. What will happen to oil prices?
5. And last but not least what will happen to the economy? Only today we had a call from a customer who wanted to cancel a holiday she'd recently booked because she'd been made redundant. Is she just the first?
Elsewhere I've read on www.travelmole.com/ that some of the big operators are still quite upbeat. Because if people love skiing they'll want to go even if the price goes up by 10-15 percent. However what we find is a lot of our customers come away with us on their second or third ski holiday of the season. Maybe it's that second or third trip that will get cancelled if money gets a bit tight.

Big Changes afoot at SpeedDater

Since I last posted we've sold our dating business to Easydate to concentrate on Singles Travel. This is good because it allows us to focus but also scary because the steady income of our dating business has been replaced by the more cyclical income from our travel business.
We had a very successful singles ski holiday season overall but learned a few tough lessons along the way. We had too much capacity in January which proved expensive. We were also badly hit by the loss in value of the pound against the Euro. The pound fell a whopping 16 percent in about six months which, unsurprisingly has had a very negative effect on our margins.