Mr. Colin Walsh:

The call centre is based in Thurles. There are nine people involved and they handle in the region of 200,000 bookings a year. In terms of the narrative around the call centre, there have been calls recently for the sales centre to be closed and for the nine jobs in Tipperary to go. The call centre is an integral part of our commercial infrastructure. While our online transactions, bookings and so on are growing strongly, the nature of our business is that we take the payments up-front. Most of our bookings are group bookings of different sizes. We have bookings with many tour operators as well, so we have to have a team of people at the end of the phone dealing with the people making the bookings. Someone might ring to book a group of five or ten people. They have to get the money from all the people, work out the package they want and the part of the restaurant they want.

The other element of the business that has changed somewhat in recent years is that we try to manage yield and revenue. We manage a mix of sales packages in order that we are maximising the yield and the revenues from the sales mix daily and weekly.