ABTA Case Study

Background

Founded over 70 years ago, ABTA provides trusted travel guidance and protection to the public.

With over 4,300 travel brands as members, ABTA is the first point of contact for travellers when unforeseen issues threaten their plans.

Beyond customer support, ABTA plays a crucial role in ensuring health and safety standards within the travel industry and promoting responsible tourism at home and abroad.

While ABTA’s in-house team typically manages customer enquiries, certain events - such as a travel company collapse or a major incident overseas - can cause sudden and overwhelming spikes in call volumes. In these situations, ABTA needed to be able to scale up support instantly to provide reassurance and guidance.

The Challenge

Managing crisis call volumes

When Thomas Cook collapsed in September 2019, thousands of customers were left seeking urgent advice. ABTA needed immediate contact centre support to ensure affected travellers received clear, up-to-date information on their rights and next steps.

ABTA's key challenges:

With no warning and a crisis unfolding, ABTA turned to Answer4u, needing a solution within 24 hours to handle the surge in customer calls.

ABTA faced several key challenges:

• When a crisis hit, they needed extra call-handling support within 24 hours.
• Travellers required clear, up-to-date guidance on their rights and next steps.
• Call agents needed to provide reassurance, empathy, and a swift response.

To overcome these challenges, ABTA turned to Answer4u for a scalable, rapid-response contact centre solution.

Rapid response contact centre support

Following conversations held over the weekend immediately preceding the announcement of the collapse of Thomas Cook, Answer4u worked closely with ABTA to prepare a dedicated response team. Within 24 hours, trained call agents were in place, fully briefed and supported by a comprehensive knowledge base to ensure accurate guidance.

Over the following two months, Answer4u:

• Handled over 41,000 calls, providing reassurance and clear next steps.
• Filtered calls efficiently, ensuring customers reached the right departments.
• Delivered real-time updates, maintaining direct communication with ABTA’s in-house team.

Due to the success of this rapid response, ABTA once again turned to Answer4u when STA Travel collapsed and when the pandemic caused widespread cancellations and travel restrictions. Answer4u was able to deploy additional agents at short notice, helping ABTA manage calls from concerned travellers whose trips were protected.

Reliable support during industry disruptions

With Answer4u as a trusted partner, ABTA was able to scale its customer service instantly during multiple industry crises.

This partnership ensured that:

• Customers received prompt, empathetic support, even during major disruptions.
• Callers were directed to the correct services, improving efficiency.
• Accurate, up-to-date information was consistently provided.

Without this on-demand contact centre support, managing these sudden spikes in enquiries would have been a significant challenge for ABTA’s in-house team.