A new UK-based website is now offering its users a place where travelers—mostly Britons for time being—can compare what escorted tours have to offer. The site is TourHound (www.tourhound.co.uk) and it enables holiday makers to compare the components of a tour not currently covered in travel websites.

 

 

 

 

As veteran travel writer Fred Mawer describes it in a piece for the Daily Mail, “There are plenty of websites that will help you find and compare flights and hotel deals, but TourHound is the first to provide a one-stop search of touring options … The tours shown are all available, and prices are clearly displayed – you can include flights where offered, and amend the prices so they are for a single traveler. And results are shown in an unbiased way. A neatly presented summary of each tour is given, and you can click through to the relevant company to book.”

While Europe understandably leads the world regions featured on the site (Europe, Asia, Australasia, Africa, South America and North America), North America leads other regions in long-haul product, with 710 tours featured.

 

 

To illustrate the ease with which one can navigate the TourHound site, Mawer said that it took him “less than a minute to find a digestible 11 tours, offered by three companies, for cultural and foodie small-group tours to Italy next May,” and that he was able “to pare down more than 100 cultural tours of the USA in May 2018 to seven that visit New Orleans.”

All tours show are all available, and prices are clearly displayed. A visitor to the site can include flights where offered, and adapt prices for a single traveler. And results are shown in an unbiased way. A neatly presented summary of each tour is given, and one can click through to the relevant company to book.

For the moment, the new site is a bit of a work in progress, as TourHound doesn’t provide background information on the variety of tours, or guidance on choosing a suitable tour. But that should change as the site grows.

An Estimated 1,800 Travel Companies Deemed “At Risk”: Some 160 tour operators are at risk of failing, according to a chilling report that came out late last week. While most of London focused on the impact of a massive tube strike, the business newspaper City A.M. had stitched together information from several sources graphically illustrating just how fragile the overall travel industry in the UK is. Highlights from the publication’s report include the following:

-The industry is braced for thousands of insolvencies as the sector comes under increasing pressure from terrorism fears and rising costs driven by a weak British pound.

-According to data from insolvency firm Begbies Traynor, 2,679 businesses in the travel industry are currently experiencing significant distress, a 10 per cent increase compared to the previous quarter and a four per cent increase vs. the same period in 2016.

-Currently, there are just under 7,000 travel agents and tour operators in the UK, and 1,800, or 26 per cent, have attracted the “warning rating” of Company Watch, a database that measures a company’s risk of insolvency.

-Out of the 1,800 travel companies deemed at risk by Company Watch, about 450 are at “real risk” of going insolvent, said Nick Hood, business risk adviser for Opus Restructuring. Around 160 of these are tour operators.

-“Clearly, the travel industry is under severe stress from all sorts of different adverse factors,” Hood said. He added that the fortunes of travel companies depend very heavily on where they’re based around the world and their scale, with smaller companies facing higher risks.

-As if to illustrate the immediacy of the threat of insolvency for so many travel businesses, All Leisure Holidays, a specialist cruise holiday operator, stop trading last Wednesday, leaving hundreds of travelers stranded worldwide and leading to the cancellation of more than 13,000 booked holidays.

-According to travel industry expert Simon Calder, a “perfect storm” led to All Leisure Group’s downfall. Some of the company’s main cruise destinations were to North Africa, including Tunisia and Libya, the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, including Crimea.

-A weak pound sterling added to the cruise company’s troubles. Malcolm Ginsberg, an industry veteran who works for BTNews, said rising fuel costs and transactions done in dollars are likely to have also hurt the company.