Travelopia looks to widen distribution
Travelopia bosses are looking to form stronger ties with third party agents now that the company is no longer part of TUI.
The group, whose brands include Austravel, Hayes and Jarvis, Headwater, Quark Expeditions, Sunsail, Citalia, and Exodus, was sold off by TUI earlier this week to private equity firm KKR for £325 million.
Speaking to TravelMole after the deal was confirmed, Travelopia CEO Will Waggott and managing director Martin Froggatt said they were happy to have investors on board who were keen to grow the business.
"We’ve now got a partner which is genuinely interested in the business, not that TUI wasn’t interested, but naturally that interest wanes a bit when you decide to put a business up for sale and so our interaction with TUI has been limited," explained Waggott.
"Nothing has been invested in our business for a period of time, since TUI openly declared it was selling Travelopia last May, but our new partners are right behind our three-year growth plan and we’re all very excited about the future."
Waggott said being part of TUI has not worked in the company’s favour when dealing with third parties.
"I think we’ve been a bit tainted and tarred with the TUI brush, but the whole of the Board agrees that more distribution is good for our business, so now we would definitely like to engage more with third parties," he said.
Mathew Prior, MD tailormade and marine, said agents remain an ‘incredibly important part of our business’.
"In the last couple of years we have considerably invested in the way that we work with our agents and a significant part of that has been with the launch of our trade-only Travelmood brand."
He said a few months ago the group had moved to price parity with Citalia trade sales and would ‘continue to develop this moving forward’.
Travelopia has just over 4,000 staff based in the UK and across the world.
Under the new ownership, its management team will stay the same and all its brands will remain.
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Bev
Editor in chief Bev Fearis has been a travel journalist for 25 years. She started her career at Travel Weekly, where she became deputy news editor, before joining Business Traveller as deputy editor and launching the magazine’s website. She has also written travel features, news and expert comment for the Guardian, Observer, Times, Telegraph, Boundless and other consumer titles and was named one of the top 50 UK travel journalists by the Press Gazette.
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