My Biggest Promotion at Airtours Started With One Unexpected Question

Most promotions happen because somebody notices that you are doing your current job well, but the really interesting ones happen when somebody asks what you would do if there were no organisational boundaries at all.

About twelve months after joining Airtours, I finally felt I had earned my place at the top table.

The brochure pricing department was no longer relying on outdated mainframe tools, as we'd replaced much of the old technology with Excel and WYSIWYG-based systems, inspired by ideas I'd first seen from Dave Peaton at Lancaster Holidays, and I'd persuaded Mike Speak, who had supplied pricing systems during my ILG days, to help me build an entirely new brochure pricing platform.

Then David Crossland invited me to lunch.

Halfway through the conversation, he asked what initially seemed an innocent question. “If I gave you the opportunity, what would you do next?"

I didn't hesitate and told him I wanted responsibility for the Airtours Late Sales Department as well as brochure pricing. At first glance, they looked like two separate businesses, with one controlled by the contracting director setting prices eighteen months before departure based on a cost-plus basis, while the other discounted holidays in the final few weeks before departure and was run by George Marcall, the Sales Director.

But I saw them as two ends of the same commercial process. If one person understood demand from the first brochure launch through to the final unsold aircraft seat, you could optimise profitability across the entire lifecycle rather than managing two disconnected departments.

David immediately understood the logic, but there was a problem.

The Late Sales Department reported to Sales Director George Marcall, while I reported to Operations Director Ton Waslander, and his initial suggestion was that I simply report to both.

But I'd lived through that nightmare before.

At ILG I'd spent years being pulled between Hugh Morgan and Nigel Wright, each with different priorities and different expectations. It created confusion, slowed decision-making, and left nobody truly accountable, and I had no intention of repeating the experience.

Therefore, to David’s clear shock, I politely but firmly refused.

I remember saying something along the lines of, "Please sort the structure out first, then tell me who you want me to report to. I'll happily report to one person, but never two."

Looking back, it was quite an ultimatum for someone who had only been with the business a year, but I believed clarity of accountability mattered more than the promotion itself.

To David's credit, he agreed. Rather than creating a compromise, he reorganised the structure and placed both departments under George's control so there was a single reporting line.

The next challenge was rather more delicate.

The Late Sales Department was run by Andrew Crossland, David's son, who was almost exactly my age. Situations like that can easily become political, but Andrew proved to be one of the most open-minded people I have ever worked with. He genuinely wanted to learn, embraced new ideas and, perhaps most usefully of all, had a direct line to David whenever we needed decisions made quickly. Instead of becoming an obstacle, he became an important ally.

The commercial challenge itself fascinated me.

Late holidays were sold as Allocation on Arrival products, grouped by star rating and board basis rather than by individual hotel. That meant we weren't pricing hotels but were pricing aircraft seats. Every departure had its own supply-and-demand equation, with prices moving up and down according to how many seats remained.

Our target sounds almost unbelievable today. We aimed for 99% aircraft loads, effectively planning to leave only one empty seat on every flight. Towards departure, we would happily reduce holidays to as little as £79 because, once the aircraft was operating, every additional passenger still made a positive contribution towards overheads.

There was only one problem, for a data-driven analyst like me. Almost no historical data existed as it had not occurred to anybody previously that this had value. Unbelievably, to me, nobody had recorded how quickly holidays had sold the previous year or how revenue changed week by week before departure.

I was making commercial decisions almost blind, which I hated, and I promised myself that would never happen again, so we began recording detailed sales patterns, booking velocity and average revenue by departure week. Those databases became far more valuable than the prices themselves because they allowed us to understand behaviour rather than simply react to it.

The first insight was not unexpected: prices naturally fell as departure approached, as did everyone else's, creating an increasingly competitive market. It was important to understand that we weren't competing against static prices but against a highly reactive competitive marketplace.

That led to one of the simplest pricing experiments of my career.

I suspected Thomson had automated systems monitoring our prices but guessed that they required supervision from Humans and therefore would only be operating during office hours, so instead of cutting prices during the day, I reduced every departure by £20 during the busy Teletext booking window between 6pm and 9 pm, then restored the original prices so that any overnight scanning would pick up the higher prices. This allowed us to capture evening demand without triggering a competitive response.

It worked remarkably well and became a tactic I reused many times over the following decades because most automated pricing systems are not trusted to run unmonitored, and most of the human monitors go home at 6 pm. This was not a commercial ideal, just an understanding of human nature that over the years made Airtours millions.