Speaking at TTG’s first Industry Leaders Forum of 2019, Gold Medal and Travel 2 managing director Lisa McAuley said competition from B2C sellers appeared to have grown in recent weeks.

“We are seeing – particularly the B2C airline guys – being really aggressive… BA Holidays, Virgin Holidays. Their packages are uber, uber competitive.”

She explained that Gold Medal and Travel 2 – both B2B operators – have multiple meetings during the course of the day to find workarounds for when they have found a barrier to a sale.

“The pricing barriers we’re reviewing are coming largely from those suppliers and they’re being very aggressive, as they were last year,” McAuley said.

“In the first week of trading we had twice as many pricing barriers from those operators as we had the previous week.”

However, McAuley said while it was too early to tell whether peaks was going to be a “roaring success”, Gold Medal and Travel 2 were “trading some incredible numbers compared to last year”.

“It’s a case of holding your nerve, because one day doesn’t make a trend,” she concluded.

Also speaking at the forum, Peter Healey, chief executive of Vertical Travel Group, agreed there was aggressive competition, and included Jet2holidays in the list.

“Talking about how competitive companies like BA Holidays and Jet2holidays are being… we’re also seeing it with TravelRepublic, Loveholidays…

“They’re competing in that same sector where the margin now is 3% on properties… you just think ‘why would you bother?’

“They’re chasing exactly the same audience. That’s where the price is and that’s what they do,” he said.