Swapping Overseas Operations for Sales

At the end of 1994, Paul Evans had served a year of what he regarded as his punishment setting up a ground operation in Portugal and desperately wanted to come home. Unfortunately for Paul, I was standing in his way because I had taken over his old job running contracting.

By then my stock at Airtours was probably at an all-time high, and David Crossland had made it clear to Paul that he wasn't going to upset the apple cart by taking contracting away from me.

Paul therefore did what Paul always did. He came up with a plan that suited him perfectly and then worked out how to sell it to everybody else.

His proposition to me was actually quite attractive. I would move into an expanded Commercial and Sales Director role, which would include responsibility for our relationship with the newly created Going Places retail division. In return, I would give up responsibility for contracting and overseas operations.

Paul sold me on the idea and then went back to Crossland, who quickly approved the reshuffle. David did, however, annoy Paul at the last minute by keeping overseas operations separate and only giving him contracting back, complete with Amanda Wills, the strong and feisty deputy I had appointed.

For me, the move represented a major change.

I had spent virtually my entire career as a backroom commercial person. Outside Airtours and Sunworld, hardly anybody in the travel industry had heard of me. Apparently, my arrival as Sales Director was rather like somebody letting off a small bomb.

My predecessors had largely kept themselves to themselves in our northern office at Helmshore, but I did the complete opposite.

I embraced every industry event I could find and, more importantly, started talking openly to the travel trade press.

I remember travelling down to my old Reed International offices, where Travel Weekly was based, to launch a new brochure before heading across London to Woolwich and giving virtually the same spiel to a very young Lucy Huxley at rival TTG. The slightly odd part was that Lucy's dad, Trevor, ran Travel Weekly.

I quickly realised that the trade press was probably the most effective communication tool available to me.

It wasn't just about talking to independent travel agents. Going Places now had more than 10,000 staff, and I discovered that they all read Travel Weekly and TTG far more avidly than they read any internal memo Airtours sent them.

If I wanted Going Places staff excited about an Airtours product, getting the story into the trade press was often considerably more effective than sending it through official internal channels.

There was, however, a downside.

I was young, cocky, opinionated and quite prepared to say what I thought. Unsurprisingly, journalists loved it because I gave them plenty of headlines, but those headlines also created an image of me that has followed me around for much of my career.

Even today I occasionally meet somebody for the first time who eventually says, “You're much nicer than I thought you'd be.”

I have always admitted that I could be an arrogant twat, particularly in those days. But I also had an enormous loyalty streak and genuinely cared about the people I worked with. Unfortunately, unless you worked alongside me, the trade press never showed you that side.

Commercially, moving into sales was probably one of the most important changes in my Airtours career.

For the first time I could influence the price of a holiday almost from beginning to end. My commercial department increasingly controlled the discounting and pricing decisions within Going Places, as the retail chain's primary job was increasingly understood and straightforward: sell Airtours holidays and fill Airtours aircraft.

We were no longer simply a tour operator that happened to own some travel agencies and aircraft, but we were becoming genuinely vertically integrated.

And for a commercial person obsessed with controlling price, margin and volume, I had suddenly been handed virtually all the levers.