Arke (TUI)

Here we go…

Dutch tour operator and travel agent Arke (now part of leading European travel company TUI, which also owns Thomson in the UK, and rebranded TUI) opened a section on their website for gay travel. Even when this section was operational (it no longer is), there was no link to it on the homepage, and you could probably only deeplink to it, or find it via Google. Maybe Arke didnot want to alienate their mainstream customers?

Selected destinations offered on the main page of this section were the usual suspects:  Gran Canaria, Mykonos, Ibiza, Fort Lauderdale, Barcelona and Berlin. When clicking on “All gay holidays” you get a list that includes Curaçao, Greece, Spain, Austria, Switzerland and Mexico, but by then they had already lost the gay trail: neither the destinations offered, nor the accommodation were anywhere near specifically gay or even “gay friendly”.

Nice idea, but pretty mediocre in its fulfillment.