Face to Face: directferries

The ferry industry has been faced with strike action and, like all others, a struggling economic climate. Matt Davies, director at directferries shares his views on how demand for cheap travel is fueling his company’s growth. 

How has business been for directferries?

Despite a turbulent few years for the UK travel industry, we have managed to weather the storm and the company is thriving. The ash cloud was a turning point and made a big difference to the ferry sector and certainly helped us grow our database. For the entire period of the ash cloud we were booking two or three times more tickets than in peak times. The business has gone from strength to strength since then and sales across Europe have grown by 35%. Last year we saw a 19% increase in bookings. On our UK site around 30% of bookings are for non-UK routes so there are a reasonable amount of people travelling around Europe.

How has the ferry industry as a whole fared?

The industry has struggled in the last three or four years but ferry companies are putting new ships and facilities out there and there is a good future for the industry. Companies appear to have reduced sailings and become more efficient, which has helped prices come down. Also with Air Passenger Duty going up and airlines charging more for extras, the rising costs in air travel comes as an advantage to us as people look for cheaper options.

Which routes have been popular?

Holidaymakers are staying closer to home which has benefitted particular routes. For example France has always been really popular but we have seen a migration of people going from the expensive routes into northern France to shorter or cheaper routes like Dover to Calais. Those routes have grown substantially in the last two years, almost doubling in numbers. Routes into Spain and Ireland have fallen a little but while the amount of spend has gone down, the number of bookings is still high.

How have all the strikes affected your business?

When a strike happens in a country like Greece where we have hundreds of routes, it can prove tricky to reorganise cancelled bookings. However, as a ferry ticket aggregator we are often at an advantage during a strike as we have connections with numerous ferry providers. If a large operator strikes, such as Brittany Ferries for example, there are a number of other local operators we can use to rebook our customers’ tickets. . Strikes give us more of a meaning to be around as people need us to help.

Do you work with travel agents?

We have an affiliates programme in place but over the years most travel agents have stopped selling ferry products. We will have a travel agent programme at some point but the background of the company is to focus the operation online so anything that we do would be done with that in mind. It would need to be an easy-to-use platform that we can regulate easily and monitor but we would first need to look into whether travel agencies are looking to book ferry holidays.

What future plans are in place for directferries?

Each year we add a new website language or a large number of routes. We have exhausted new routes in our current markets so now we can look to other destinations such as China, Australia or the Americas. We will look at this in the next few months but will first focus on technology. We launched the first fully transactional bookable mobile site in March 2011 but this constantly needs to be updated and there is also work to be done in our social media channels so we can keep in touch with customers.