With schools spanning five different countries, LAL Language Centres is growing, having recently partnered with Cambridge International School. CEO Alex Perkins talks past, present and future with The PIE News covering the group’s 30 year history, its recent expansion and his predictions for the evolution of student bookings.
The PIE: Tell me about being owned by a tour operator – FTI – and what that means for you as an operator.
AP: We were FTI once upon a time: LAL Torbay was the very start of what is today the FTI group, which is a conglomeration of 90 different companies with a turnover of something in the region of €5bn. So very good things can grow out of language travel organisations. They are the consequence of the ingenious entrepreneurial spirit of the founder, owner and the ongoing CEO of FTI, Mr Dietmar Gunz, who is very proud of his LAL baby and looks forward to its ongoing longevity. LAL and FTI are now over 30 years old.
“We get a lot of guidance from an industry that is doing some of the same things that we are, but is delivering the final product on beaches rather than in the classroom”
We are one company in the FTI portfolio so we have to adhere to the laws of any larger corporation. There is a hub currently in Munich and we centre to that hub but LAL Language Centres is run out of London, where its head office is. The expertise and the decision making of how that company moves and shakes is very much down to us.
The PIE: Do you think you benefit from having wider oversight of the global tourist travel scene?
AP: I think that is a very good question and I think that we do benefit from that. Leisure tourism is extremely fast moving, it is a big bucks industry and you have to do to show yourself as being a little bit different from the rest. I think we do get a lot of good guidance from an industry that is doing some of the same things that we are doing, but is delivering the final product largely on beaches rather than in the classroom.
The PIE: Tell me about the partnership you’ve signed with Cambridge International School.
AP: The guy who used to be my next door neighbour came round and told me that he got a new job in Cambridge. We struck up a conversation and we thought our English language product associated with his thought-provoking and mind-bending approach to evolving your business and entrepreneurial skills could be amalgamated. Here we are running both for juniors and for adults.
“We think it is a marriage made in heaven and it is really going to work”
The two courses we’re introducing – ‘Thought Leader’ for the adults and the ‘Teenage Boss’ for the kids – will draw in the very best of our techniques, and elicit from Cambridge this life enhancing, open-ended opportunity for people to expand their brains at the same time as learning about business and entrepreneurialism. We think it is a marriage made in heaven and it is really going to work. I was proud to be working with CIS in Cambridge, it puts Cambridge into our portfolio. I think our product is unique and different.
The PIE: Will it just be in English?
AP: Yes, it will be about learning English and techniques to learn English. At the same time there will be all sorts of other recesses for the students, where they can go ahead and become the business leaders of tomorrow, so it is a very, very nice thing for us.
The PIE: How do you seeing the industry evolving in the next five to 10 years?
AP: It’s extraordinarily difficult to predict, we are in a very, very fast changing world, and I think the only known is that innovation will lead the industry: the ability of our industry to adapt to associate itself with online products, new destinations and ever changing aspiration going on in the heads of our end users. I couldn’t predict to you at all where we will be in 10 years’ time.
Where I do think we will be in one to two years, though, is in a consolidating market with few players with higher quality – more stringent compliance and accreditation regimes where both government requirements and best practice come into play together.
“We are in a very, very fast changing world, and I think the only known is that innovation will lead the industry”
The world isn’t terribly secure at the moment and our industry can be seen by some perhaps as a back door to illegal immigration and entry. I think our industry has for too long been in denial of that very salient fact and we should face up to the fact that we would be doing ourselves, our industry and our national government a big favour by toughening up our own principles and procedures.
The PIE: What about the way the students book? And the use of agents?
AP: Well it is very much under threat at the moment, if you want to use that term, from the online facility. I was at ALTO in 2014 or 2015, and asked the panel the question: why is it that those booking holidays [online] amount to 40% – I think it is more than that – of all booking clientele, whereas in the language travel industry it was only 9% at the time? That’s according to the ALTO/Deloitte survey in 2014.
Clearly that is because agents have a particular role to play in our industry, but at the same time it is obviously because schools have not invested in the technology of how to reach the market directly. Why should our industry be any different to any other? It can only go in that direction.
There is probably a new role again for a consolidating agent market to work hand in hand with schools, so that together they can capture the student online and then counsel them through the process. This idea that there are two separate worlds seems to me a bit of a false division in 2016.
