Shopping For Lions

I’m off to South Africa in June for the British and Irish Lions tour. I know I’ve mentioned it before, but I’m pretty excited about it! It was the first time in a while I’ve used the internet to shop for a holiday (that wasn’t through sunshine.co.uk). 

Being a travel punter again was an interesting experience, so I thought I’d share how I arrived at booking with the particular company I chose. My (and Tweag’s who was coming too) requirements for the trip were -

• an organised tour, safety in numbers
• to include official match tickets
• to include the second test, as it’s usually the decider
• be less than 2 weeks long
• direct flights from London, preferably Virgin

The official Lions website points to LionsTour.com which lists the 4 official suppliers (Official Licensed Operators).

England Rugby Travel - Good selection of tours, a lot of the ones that were on the money for our requirements had already sold out though. The Nyala looked pretty promising and made the short list. However, to find out exactly which flights and hotels were available you had to start the booking process, which was awful. Running on Flash, it had 11 steps if you were actually going to complete the booking! I also had to keep inserting the same info each time I re-started the process.

Gullivers Travel – Probably the most well known (and popular) travel company for rugby tours. The had a good selection of tours, but by January there were only a handful left and they’d added a few new options. The info on the website was pretty sparse, with a pdf of their brochure being the main source of information. Nothing really jumped out as an option for my req’s.

Sportsworld – Their Drop Goal tour looked perfect. Unfortunately again, of the 5 original options, the only two that would have worked for us were sold out.

Thomas Cook Sport – Lots of options, most still available. Each tour option included named hotels and URL’s where available. The website itself is quite sterile in design, with any attempt at going into the booking process having zero response for me.

At this point I phoned around most of the companies to see if I could get any information that wasn’t available on their sites, and to find out if there was any flexibility in the remaining packages. Gullivers and Sportsworld weren’t interested in adding us to their tours if we weren’t going to take the package flight, even though I was happy for them to book an alternative for us (with a nice commission too no doubt).

By now we had decided that we really didn’t want to fly to Cape Town in between the two tests while we were there, ruling out England RT. That and the fact we’d automatically join the England Rubgy Travel club, and that’s too much to bear for a Scotsman, even for a Lions Trip

Thomas Cook already used Virgin and were happy to try and come to some arrangement and fit us into one of their remaining packages.

I’d had a look around for other agencies selling tours, but was pretty wary of going all the way to South Africa and ending up not getting a bloody ticket to the game!  While I was waiting to hear back from TC I found Living With The Lions who had an almost perfect option for our trip. I rang them up and they were happy to accommodate our requirements and confirmed official match tickets were included.

So why did we end up going with LWTL and not TC? Well we wanted to go to South Africa as part of an organised tour for mostly safety reasons ie. not getting shot.

Looking at LWTL’s website, they had pictures from the last Lions tour to New Zealand in 2005. It looked like what we thought a rugby tour should look like! The Thomas Cook Sport site, while full of information, didn’t convey that same tour feeling and we worried we’d end up stuck in our hotels for the whole trip waiting on our rep to come pick us up. Also going with a company that was originally created to go on a Lions tour gives us confidence it’ll be well organised and great fun. Being in a niche has its advantages!