My First Airtours Brochure: The Day Data Beat Tradition

People often assume that the biggest commercial breakthroughs come from brilliant new products or massive marketing budgets. In reality, they usually come from someone prepared to challenge a process that everyone else accepts as "the way we've always done it."

I'd barely found my feet in Wavell House when David Crossland gave me what, at the time, felt like an impossible challenge. For years Airtours had followed a simple formula when pricing its summer brochures. We waited for Thomson, our biggest competitor, to publish theirs, then spent the next couple of months working through every shared hotel, making sure we were just a little bit cheaper.

It was logical, safe and almost impossible to criticise, but the key problem was that it was not a winning strategy but just a following one.

David recognised the fault in his own strategy was that by waiting for Thomson to move first, they were also getting first pick of the most profitable customers. Those valuable early bookers were committing their holidays before Airtours was even on sale.

His instruction to me was wonderfully simple, "Change it”, but that was easier said than done because Airtours had no pricing system of its own.

Fortunately, I hadn't arrived completely empty-handed, as during my time at ILG and Sunworld I had already learnt that historic booking data tells an incredibly detailed story if you are prepared to listen to it. Every destination, every departure date and every hotel was effectively voting on whether we'd priced it too high or too low.

The challenge was turning that history into a pricing model that could predict the future.

I started by analysing previous sales to identify where holidays had sold out too quickly because we'd underpriced them, and where demand had been disappointingly weak because we'd asked customers to pay too much.

Then I added something Airtours hadn't previously measured. Instead of simply accepting that hotel costs had increased, I compared prices across repeat-contracted properties to build a destination-by-destination price inflation index. Suddenly we could see exactly where our contracting costs were genuinely increasing and where they perhaps shouldn't have been.

Ton Waslander, my boss, immediately realised that the analysis gave him a powerful way to challenge his contracting team. Some of Airtours' most experienced buyers suddenly found themselves explaining why certain hotels had received large price increases, while cheaper properties often had better brochure photography and appeared to offer stronger value to customers.

I suspect my popularity dipped rather dramatically with the contracting team at that moment.

The more I analysed Thomson, the stranger their pricing appeared. I expected to discover an incredibly sophisticated commercial model, but instead, it looked as though they largely ignored the underlying costs and simply moved prices through the season using standard percentage adjustments regardless of the hotel involved.

To me, that created an enormous opportunity.

Instead of copying Thomson's prices, I built our prices from the ground up using our own costs and expected demand, then overlaid what I believed Thomson would eventually charge. It was considerably more work than simply undercutting them, but it meant we could be cheaper where customers were price-sensitive while earning higher margins where demand was naturally strong.

Brochure sales increased by around 20%, while average margins improved by £11 per passenger. For a young manager still proving himself, those numbers mattered far more than any presentation or management meeting ever could.

David Crossland and Ton Waslander weren't impressed because I'd worked long hours but were impressed because I could demonstrate, with evidence, that the business was making more money.

That experience has stayed with me throughout my career, whether building travel businesses, investing in technology companies or now working with AI.

Hard work will always earn respect, but data-backed results earn opportunity.

Too many managers assume their job is to explain how hard they're working, whilst managers who build exceptional careers do something different. They build systems that measure the commercial impact of what they do, because once you can prove you're creating value, promotions and bigger opportunities have a habit of finding you.

The principle, however, hasn't changed at all.

The businesses that win aren't necessarily the ones with the biggest budgets or the loudest marketing. They're the ones who understand their data better than anyone else and have the confidence to act on what it tells them.