Artisan Travel – temporarily on hold

The impact COVID-19 is having on the global travel sector is devastating. For small artisan travel businesses, like Spencer Scott Travel, it has been a catastrophic blow.

The global travel industry is colossal, diverse and multi-faceted. All sectors have suffered massive disruption with huge losses in revenue. However, “one size definitely does not fit all”. Most large tour operators and airlines are able to continue operating because they trade on credit and can utilise the emergency implemented voucher scheme to retain as much income as possible, even though they are operating on a much reduced scale. However, for private coach operators and artisan travel businesses that do not trade on credit, the impact of the travel ban was extreme leaving them with no option but to cease operations immediately and put forward trading on hold for the foreseeable future.   

Small group special experience holidays are totally reliant on a niche sector of the tourism market. Bespoke one-off special experience holidays hosted by well-known experts and TV personalities, which Spencer Scott Travel organises, are an even smaller niche sector – ‘la crème de la crème of holidays’, which are so unique in their components and arrangements that they cannot be replicated or sourced anywhere else.  We are only able to offer a handful of programmes each year because each one evolves over a long period of time and out of years of research and months of planning with the expert hosts, in advance of being released a year ahead of the departure date.

We are confident that the demand for exclusive one-off special experience holidays will bounce back as soon as it is safe to travel again. However, in the current climate of so many unknowns and because of the unique nature of such holidays we will not be launching any new programmes until the risk of further travel restrictions diminishes significantly. We hope this will be the situation in early 2021.

Kathmandu

In the meantime, we still have a safari to the Masai Mara Reserve in Kenya with Big Cat Diary naturalist Jackson Looseyia in January and painting holidays with Adebanji Alade VPROI and the One Show’s ‘artist in residence’  to Essaouira in Morocco and with Peter Brown PNEAC, RBA, PS, ROI, RP to Kathmandu in Nepal in March.

Essaouira

Our research and planning is on-going and we have lots of ideas and new destinations on the back-burner – Switzerland, Iceland, The Peloponnese, Croatia, Tangiers, Portugal …..  We will be back with an exciting new programme as soon as possible.