Commercial director Mark Duguid said Kuoni’s LGBT focus had proved a notable success, with a “significant rise” in LGBT enquiries since training a group of personal travel experts (PTEs) to become specialists in selling holidays to same-sex couples last September.

The operator has nine LGBT-trained experts based in stores across the country, with Kuoni’s Brighton store – where all the staff are experts – proving particularly successful. “To date 25% of the business [in Brighton] has been same-sex couples,” Duguid said. “That’s a quarter of the business. It made us realise we needed to do dedicated training so it became a fully trained store.”

He said Kuoni would be rolling out the training to all staff across the group “to ensure a level of consistency”, although Duguid stressed the nine specialists would remain the key experts.

“We realised we needed to roll out dedicated LGBT training to the entire sales force [around 250 in total] – LGBT enquiries will still be directed to the LGBT experts where possible but we know that this can’t always happen, so we need to ensure that all sales staff have the knowledge to handle LGBT enquiries.”

Duguid said the existing LGBT PTEs would help in the training,  alongside videos and webinars. “We want to get everyone to a certain level and to have an awareness,” he said.

He added that “another strand was to engage with more suppliers. We want to explore regions that may not be recognised as being so LGBT-friendly, like the Caribbean.”

It comes as Duguid revealed Kuoni was planning to replicate its LGBT model with a new family specialist offering. “The plan is to bring together a panel of experts with an affinity for families,” he told TTG. “We will train them to become accredited as family experts.” Initially 10 PTEs will be trained, “although I hope we would expand that given the size of the family market,” Duguid added.