Mottershead outlines Travelzest vision
Travelzest chief executive Chris Mottershead has revealed the company will make a further four acquisitions within 12 months as it looks to create a new specialist travel group in the UK.
The former Airtours and TUI executive said ski and golf were among the target sectors along with medium-haul destinations not served by low cost carriers.
Mottershead told TravelMole that talks were on-going with a number of companies.
“We want to grow through acquisition and I would expect to make four purchases within 12 months,” he revealed. “We have been approached by number of people and we are in different stages of conversation. There are some wonderful companies out there.”
Mottershead’s vision to create a specialist group has begun to take shape with the acquisition of Holiday Express in a deal worth up to £4.4 million. Travelzest shareholders will approve the deal at an extraordinary general meeting at the end of the month.
He said he was drawn to Holiday Express largely because of its website domain names – www.holiday.co.uk, www.flight.co.uk and www.discountholidays.com.
“There is bags of potential,” he said. “The holiday.co.uk site is full of mainstream package holiday content and is fully transactional but flight.co.uk does not currently have a tremendous amount of product.”
He said the aim would be to create a dynamic packaging site featuring mainly, though not exclusively, specialist products.
“Most specialist sell direct to the public. We want to create a travel portal and provide them with an opportunity for them to sell their stock through a domain name,” said Mottershead.
“Customers like creating baskets. They want to pick and choose,” he added.
On future acquisitions, Mottershead said golf and ski specialists are top of the list along with destination companies out of reach of the low cost carriers.
“We would be interested in destinations such as North Africa and safari destinations – countries where people need information from experts and that are more than three or four hours from the UK,” he said.
Report by Steve Jones
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