Mr. Atkinson: We are a diversified holiday tour operator, with a full market cap of about GBP150 million. We have three businesses, one of which is the original business of the group: camping and mobile holidays in Europe, mainly in France and Italy, broadly aimed at a middle-class family market, in the UK, Germany, Holland and various other European countries, so the customers come from a whole range of European countries to go to destinations in Europe. That's about 60% of the overall business. The second business is Hotel Short Breaks, which currently is UK breaks for UK customers, sold mainly through travel agents but increasingly via direct sell and on the Internet as well. That is basically weekend breaks for people from all over the UK. About 40% of the business goes into London but we have hotel room allocations from hotels all over the country. The third business is worldwide adventure holidays. We made an acquisition, a sizeable acquisition for us, Explore Worldwide, last February, and these are small-group soft adventure tours to 90 countries world-wide, and we subsequently acquired a company called Regal Holidays, who are the UK market leaders in diving holidays. It's a relatively small business, but it's part of the division. It mainly goes to the Egyptian Red Sea, but is increasingly arranging holidays further afield in more exotic destinations, such as the Maldives and the Caribbean.
TWST: Let me have your assessment of the outlook and the trends in the
holiday market over the next 18-24 months, broken down by business area,
where necessary. What do you expect?
Mr. Atkinson: We think that all our businesses have good prospects.
Obviously they're all in three different markets - we'd really have to
talk about that separately. Regarding our Camping holidays we have two
major types of accommodation: one is tent holidays, where people stay
under canvas, which we provide, and we provide all the equipment. The
other is in mobile homes, large static caravans. The prospects for the
different types of accommodation are rather different.
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