The Most Important Data in a Business Is Often Inside Someone's Head

When I first took over the Airtours late sales department, I was shocked by how little data was being used to make pricing decisions.

I had come from a finance background and instinctively believed that if we collected enough information about sales, capacity and pricing, the numbers would tell us what to do.

They certainly helped, but I quickly discovered that some of the most valuable data in Airtours wasn't sitting inside a computer at all. It was sitting inside the heads of people who had been doing the job for years.

Andrew Crossland taught me one of the first lessons about the macro environment of late sales. The school holiday break-up around 22nd July effectively created a dam in the market. As you approached it, there was an enormous temptation to panic if sales slowed and start reducing prices, but Andrew knew from experience that parents with children had limited flexibility and eventually needed to book.

It became a massive game of chicken between the tour operators and customers. Would customers blink first and pay the higher prices because they desperately wanted to get their kids out of a wet and boring British summer, or would one of the tour operators lose its nerve and start discounting?

The fascinating thing was that it wasn't an Airtours dam. It was a market dam shared by Thomson, Airtours, First Choice and Thomas Cook. Any one of us could create the first crack and, just like a real dam, once the water started flowing through it, prices could collapse remarkably quickly. Andrew had lived through enough summers to know when we needed to hold our nerve.

His deputy Nigel Billington had another form of knowledge that no spreadsheet could replicate. Nigel had been in the department for 16 years and experienced around ten late-sales seasons. I might have arrived with financial qualifications and lots of ideas about using data, but it would have been incredibly arrogant not to recognise the value of somebody who had already seen virtually every market scenario I was encountering for the first time.

Andrew and Nigel also taught me a lot about recruiting people.

When we needed to expand the department, I naturally suggested recruiting graduates. Neither Andrew nor Nigel had been to university, and they thought this was a terrible idea. Their preference was to take bright 16-year-olds straight from school and mould them around how Airtours operated.

They were right.

Many recruits already had family connections within Airtours, which was how I first employed Greg Wills, the younger brother of contractor Amanda Wills and son of the indomitable Margery Wills, who subsequently gave me many lectures about how I should be managing her much-loved children.

The late sales department became an extraordinary breeding ground for talent, producing people who went on to have major careers across the travel industry, including Greg and Mark Slater, who later worked at Booking.com.

There was also sound commercial logic behind developing people internally. Airtours was a northern tour operator competing in an industry where much of the experienced management talent was based in the South. Persuading established executives to relocate north was difficult and expensive, so investing heavily in young people, giving them responsibility early and allowing the best to rise quickly became an important competitive advantage.

Fortunately, David Crossland and the senior Airtours management believed in exactly the same philosophy.

I discovered that rather unexpectedly when David's brother-in-law, Tom Trickett, was organising the replacement for my company car. Tom had decided I needed something considerably sexier and turned up with number 46 from a limited series of Toyota Celica rally cars, and my God, what a car.

When I pointed out that it was way outside my company-car grade, Tom simply shrugged his shoulders and replied, "Not for long, son."

Not long afterwards, I understood exactly what he meant as I was promoted to the tour operating board.

The experience reinforced something I've believed ever since. Data tells you what is happening, but experienced people often understand why it's happening, and the best businesses don't choose between data and human knowledge but just blend them.