Tour operator de force

Chris Mottershead and I meet at Travelzest HQ at St Martin’s Place, just off Trafalgar Square, where the Yorkshire-born, Welsh-accented travel industry sage takes a break from Travelzest toils to talk me through his illustrious career.

‘I was born in Yorkshire, but Wales is home,’ says the Manchester United fan whose insights are much sought after in the travel sector. In fact, he’s so highly regarded that he was recently asked to address the Association of British Travel Agents (ABTA) 2005 conference for a session entitled ‘Future Gazing’.

From the off, it’s clear that Mottershead relishes new challenges when the odds are stacked against him, and it’s this dogged facet of his personality that’s spurred his biggest achievements during his working life.

He’s first and foremost revered for his exceptional commercial skills, so it’s something of a surprise to discover that he is in fact an accountant by trade.
‘It is funny,’ he laughs, ‘but many of the main travel industry figures actually have a financial background. The travel sector is a huge financial model that’s all about maximising yield and minimising risk. External factors influence the market – 9/11, wars and so on – but there are also internal factors at play that are more controllable, such as how you manage foreign exchange and interest rates.’

Turnaround triumph
It was at Airtours Holidays that Mottershead made his biggest impact. Appointed as finance director in late 1993, by June 1998 he had become managing director of the travel behemoth. During his time at the controls, he grew Airtours Holidays profitably to become the largest tour operator in the UK, improving product, dramatically reducing customer complaints and successfully introducing a ‘values’ programme that boosted customer and employee retention levels.

‘Airtours was a great learning ground for me,’ recalls Mottershead, fondly. ‘I joined at a time when the group was going through a period of rapid growth. And at the Airtours Holidays arm, we were actually creating the profits that allowed the rest of the group to make acquisitions.

‘It was my idea to introduce that huge values program into the organisation. I wanted to make sure that we were commercial as well as highly customer service focused. So we became more creative in the way in which we packaged and sold our holidays. Stemming from these efforts, we managed to knock Thomson off the number one spot, becoming the largest UK holiday operator in terms of both size and profits.’
Having toppled Airtours’ rival from its perch, less hungry players might have rested on their laurels. However, he had an urge to accept a new challenge across the pond and in January 2000, took on the mantle of President and CEO of Airtours’ North American Leisure Group (NALG), where he was charged with overseeing all the group’s North American companies except TSI. These included two leading Canadian charter tour operators (Sunquest Vacations and Alba Tours) as well as US charter tour operators Suntrips and Vacation Express.

‘NALG was a business that had never made money because it had been badly managed – the product was all supply-driven. It was a case of, “here’s what we’ve got and here’s what you’re having”. Well, I decided I was going to change all that. I carried out some aggressive internal restructuring – there were too many chiefs with a lack of interest – and I switched to demand-driven product. ‘Within two years, we went from losses of $35 million to profits of $35 million.’

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