Thomas Cook signs hotel sourcing deal
Thomas Cook Group has signed an agreement to outsource 3,000 hotel contracts to a third party.
The operator has signed an agreement for travel service provider Webjet Limited’s European online accommodation business, Sunhotels, to take responsibility for sourcing and contracting hotels.
It follows a successful partnership that Sunhotels already has with Thomas Cook in its Nordic markets.
As part of the new deal, Thomas Cook will transfer around 3,000 hotel contracts from across the group to Sunhotels.
These will be added to Sunhotels’s existing hotel inventory of 75,000 hotels across the world, which will also be offered to Thomas Cook as part of the agreement.
The partnership will allow Thomas Cook to focus on growing its core differentiated holiday offering while at the same time providing customers with a wider range and choice of complementary hotels in a more efficient way.
Sunhotels will also take responsibility for managing an improved health and safety audit process, ensuring greater certainty and consistency in the quality of the customer offering.
Thomas Cook said the move represents an important step forward in its group-wide transformation programme, the New Operating Model.
"By moving the direct contracting for complementary hotels to a trusted partner, Thomas Cook will be able to better harmonise and simplify its IT platforms and business processes across its 15 source markets, delivering cost savings by reducing the complexity in its business," the operator said.
Thomas Cook chief executive, Peter Fankhauser, added: "Entering this new relationship with Webjet will transform the way in which Thomas Cook offers a wide choice of hotels to customers.
"It provides us with a low-cost production platform for our complementary offer across all our source markets, enabling us to streamline our systems and processes while at the same time ensuring greater certainty over the quality of hotels that we offer our customers.
"This frees us up to focus on growing our differentiated holiday offering, the area where we know Thomas Cook can really make a difference."
Lisa
Lisa joined Travel Weekly nearly 25 years ago as technology reporter and then sailed around the world for a couple of years as cruise correspondent, before becoming deputy editor. Now freelance, Lisa writes for various print and web publications, edits Corporate Traveller’s client magazine, Gateway, and works on the acclaimed Remembering Wildlife series of photography books, which raise awareness of nature’s most at-risk species and helps to fund their protection.
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