Green: Creating good holidays, how hard can it be?

When Harriet Green joined Thomas Cook as group chief executive 32 weeks ago (she’s counting the days), she found the staff were "shattered, beleaguered, upset" after the company they treasured had, in her own words, "nearly hit the wall".

Green’s starting point for finding out what had gone wrong was to ask those who worked there. "It is my belief that people inside a business know what’s wrong and what needs fixing," she said. In Thomas Cook’s case, they had plenty to say. Some 8,000 of them provided her with "pages and pages" of information.

Now, sadly, 2,500 of those staff are facing redundancy because, among other problems, Green quickly identified that Cook had too many shops, too many offices spread across the country, and too many conflicting brands.

Coming into a company and getting rid of 15% of its workforce would be a painful decision for anyone, but Green gives the impression that while she isn’t exactly ruthless, she is efficient. In just 32 weeks she has brought about more than 70 significant changes to the business.

Green insists she is committed to maintaining a strong retail network, although in the future the shops will be "more Apple than travel". She insists the Thomas Cook brand will grow, she repeatedly states that it "won’t shrink to greatness", but to do that she’s prepared to chop away the excess.

"Of the 195 shops that are under review, 48% are within a kilometre of another Thomas Cook," said Green. Turning to the brands, she said many were duplicating, competing or not adding value to the business. Several are already up for sale, but she refused to say which. "We are going through a simplification process," she said.

She appears in a hurry to get on with it, reluctant to waste even a second. When she arrives promptly for her first press meeting since unveiling Thomas Cook’s turnaround plan this week and finds a few of the journalists have yet to arrive, she darts off and returns 10 minutes later when everyone is gathered. She ends the meeting bang on time, answering the last couple of questions while walking out of the door, off to another meeting.

She has bags of nervous energy, her stiletto heel constantly jigging as she talks. She says the realisation that Thomas Cook’s OTA had to stop competing with the rest of the business came to her in week six of the job, "while I was running along the Canal". "I am the sort of woman who has stretch goals on my fridge," she adds.

Green acknowledges that her appointment was a surprise for some, simply because she was an outsider, she’d never previously worked in travel having spent most of her working life in electronics. "People were amazed I’d never been a rep, that I couldn’t quote all the codes for all the major airports around the world," she jokes, but she admits she thought the reaction was odd. "I have lived and worked in four continents."

Some might have thought her lack of travel industry experience a weakness, but she clearly doesn’t. Rather, she thinks that her predecessors at Thomas Cook over-complicated things. "This is not the French nuclear industry, it’s not a complex business," she said, "how difficult can it be to put together good holidays?"

Green has, however, shrewdly assembled a management team with bags of relevant experience. Her right-hand man, the new UK and Ireland CEO Peter Fankhauser has travel industry form, having previously served as CEO of Thomas Cook in Continental Europe.
Also, she points out that she has a background in transforming business via the web, and she has brought in digital entrepreneur John Straw to develop an internet strategy for Thomas Cook.

Already the company is testing five or six apps for tablets and smartphones, she said, as part of the group’s aim to increase its online sales from a third to half of all bookings. Developing an omni-channel distribution strategy will be one of the keys to success, says Green.

When she joined Thomas Cook, it was described by one financial journalist as "a basket case", so what made Green, a successful CEO in the electronics industry, want to take it on? "I could say because I thought that was bollocks," she quips. Her first holiday was with Thomas Cook and she believes it is a quality, affordable brand, but she didn’t take the job for sentimental reasons. Green said she saw that the company had a robust 22% gross margin, which wasn’t translating into operating profits. She realised that if she could strip away layers of costs, she could increase the profit. "I thought that was eminently doable."

By Linsey McNeill