Travel Europe is expecting to make 3 million euros in net profits for 2014

TourMaG.com - Travel Europe will soon publish the 2014 results, can you tell us what explains these results?

Helmut Gschwentner: The global business turnover of the Travel Europe group will be of €116M, showing a small increase of 1.5% compared to 2013.

TourMaG.com - What do these results mean?

H.G.: The results are seeing this increase because we’re going to make €3M in net benefits before taxes.

TourMaG.com - Was this fiscal year better than the previous ones?

H.G.: No, every year we have positive results that enable us to have a capital close to €22.6M in 2015.

TourMaG.com - What do you make of these benefits?

H.G.: We’re lucky to be a family company with 2 shareholders: my brother Toni and I. Meaning that we don’t have to give dividends to outside shareholders.

Then, we use our profits to maintain the level of our property assets. We own a building in Austria of 2,100 m2 in which are working 120 collaborators.

We also have one in Stans, in Tyrol, a hotel of 122 rooms that we renovated in 2012 to add a Spa of 3,000 m2 that costed €9.8M invested essentially from our own funds.

TourMaG.com - What’s going on with your branches?

H.G.: Our branches are representations of the parent company Travel Europe, they either hold incoming functions like in Croatia, Madeira, Hungary, for a total of 11 offices throughout Europe, or they have business development functions such as Visit Europe in France.

In each of these branches, we invest around 30 of our annual profit to develop employment, communication, digital systems, furniture and housing comfort.

TourMaG.com - Can we say that the Travel Europe group has a secure future ahead?

H.G: You know, we can never predict the future, especially in our field. But we have three advantages that enable us to be relatively at peace.

First of all, we have enough of our own funds which will help us to survive through potential rough years. Secondly, we focus on European tour destinations that are for now preserved from bad geopolitical and weather conditions.

Finally, we have an economic model that can only exist thanks to good cash flow management: such as the financial commitment on air transport shares, more than 600 rotations were chartered on average, and with major hotel properties in more than 20 destinations.