The International Expansion Years

In the 1990s, Airtours grew at a remarkable rate, but one major challenge was that our flying programme was heavily weighted toward the European summer. We had aircraft that were incredibly valuable when everybody wanted to fly to Spain, Greece and Turkey, but rather less useful when the British winter arrived. David Crossland and the Group Board therefore started looking internationally for businesses that could provide customers during the winter months when the UK market slowed down.

The first obvious move was Scandinavia, where the winter holiday market was much stronger, particularly to destinations such as the Canary Islands and Gambia. Airtours acquired Scandinavian Leisure Group from SAS for around £74 million, including Ving, a small hotel chain called Sunwing, a cruise ship, and a 50% stake in the charter airline Premiair. I had absolutely nothing to do with that acquisition, but its success encouraged David to look for other international markets that might offer the same counter-seasonal benefits.

That was how I unexpectedly ended up in Canada.

The call came virtually the day after I had opened Sanford International Airport in Florida. Instead of flying home with my family, I waved them off on the Airtours charter back to Manchester, found myself some warmer clothes and headed north to Toronto.

On arrival, I was whisked straight into a meeting with Robbie Goldberg, a legendary figure in Canadian tour operating, who was potentially prepared to sell his business to Airtours and then help us consolidate other Canadian operators around it. The meeting itself also provided one of those slightly bizarre lessons in how business was sometimes conducted in those days.

When Robbie left the room, David immediately put his finger to his lips and ushered us into the restroom, where he turned the taps on before allowing us to talk. When I asked what on earth he was doing, he explained that Robbie had conveniently left his briefcase under the meeting table and that, just like David's own briefcase, its handle contained a recording device.

Apparently neither side entirely trusted the other not to record the post-meeting conversation. It was my first real exposure to some of the more under-the-table espionage techniques that existed around major deals, something that would unfortunately come back to haunt me later in my Airtours career.

I ended up spending nearly two months effectively locked in Robbie's offices learning a completely new market, including why seemingly every Canadian airport code began with a "Y". More importantly, I discovered a tour operating market that made even the UK look predictable. Around 60% of customers booked within three months of departure, and substantial numbers of seats could still be sold by airport-based travel agents on the actual day of departure.

My conclusion was that Robbie's operation simply wasn't big enough. Airtours needed sufficient scale to support the minimum aircraft fleet required to make the economics work, and I recommended that we walk away.

David listened, accepted the logic and did exactly that. But in typical David Crossland fashion, he didn't abandon the idea. He simply came back about six months later with a much bigger solution and acquired Sunquest, Canada's largest independent tour operator, which became the first major building block of Airtours' North American Leisure Group.

I still look back very fondly on those months in Toronto. Chris Mottershead subsequently got the opportunity to move there and run the Canadian operation for three years, something I know he enjoyed immensely. Had I stayed at Airtours, I suspect Canada might have been somewhere I would have pushed hard to go myself.

What Canada reinforced for me, just as Australia had done earlier in my career, was that the dynamics of individual travel markets can be completely different, but the core commercial skills of tour operating are remarkably transferable. Understand aircraft utilisation, capacity, pricing, distribution and customer behaviour, and you can apply those skills almost anywhere in the world.

It also gave me a front-row seat to how acquisitions were done at speed and how commercial Due Diligence was far more important than the stuff the accounts did,

Travel turned out to be a far more portable career than I ever imagined when I first entered it.