The Infamous Airtours Commercial Weekenders

As a young boss, and even today, I have always believed that one of the best ways to build a close team is to get them thoroughly drunk together. It may not appear in many modern management textbooks, but I can assure you it worked remarkably well at Airtours.

The problem was that our Commercial Department was based in the tiny Lancashire village of Helmshore. We did have the White Horse pub, which became a regular Friday afternoon destination, but with virtually no public transport and most people needing to drive home, a couple of pints was normally as exciting as it got.

One Friday I was complaining about this to Andrew Crossland, who ran our Late Sales Department, telling him how much I missed the Jasmine wine bar in Bromley where, during my ILG days, we could properly let our hair down.

Andrew immediately spotted a solution, although interestingly it came from understanding the strange economics of the package holiday business.

During September and October, when the children had gone back to school, seven-night holidays often sold much better than fourteen-night ones. We therefore had to switch duration control, which allocated aircraft capacity predominantly to fourteen-night holidays, towards seven nights at the end of the August School holiday period.

The problem was that this created empty inbound seats that could not be sold, because we hadn't sent enough customers out fourteen nights earlier to fill the aircraft coming home. In those days we hardly sold any flight-only seats in resort, so several hundred aircraft seats were effectively going to fly empty anyway.

Combine those with spare outbound seats at the last minute, and suddenly we could create Thursday-to-Sunday trips to Majorca for less than £99 a number my expense budget could cope with.

We sensibly decided not to tell anybody else about this opportunity.

Instead, the Airtours Commercial Weekender was born.

The first was to Mimosa Park, an Airtours-owned hotel on the outskirts of Magaluf, where approximately 25 members of the Commercial Department arrived with the fairly clear objective of consuming as much alcohol as possible on Steve Endacott's expense account.

To describe these weekends as wild would be something of an understatement. They were tremendous bonding exercises, although I rapidly had to introduce a strict rule banning relationships with direct reports. Strangely, departmental reshuffles then seemed to become particularly popular just before each trip.

These weekends created an incredibly tight team. You could almost have cut us down the middle and found "Airtours Commercial Department" written through us like a stick of Blackpool rock.

They also created some potentially career-ending moments.

I had an unfortunate habit of skinny-dipping late at night, and on one particular trip a young commercial protégé called Greg Wills decided it would be hilarious to steal all my clothes, forcing me to walk completely naked through reception at the Escapades youth hotel where we were staying.

Normally at three in the morning nobody would have noticed. Unfortunately, two ladies in their mid-sixties had mistakenly been dropped at the wrong hotel and were understandably creating merry hell at reception.

Product Manager Brendan Fox had tried to calm them down by explaining that Airtours Commercial Director Steve Endacott happened to be staying in the hotel and would personally sort everything out.

Perfect timing.

I walked naked into reception.

Most sensible people would have immediately turned around. Unfortunately, in my highly intoxicated state, I decided the appropriate response was to walk over, shake their hands and introduce myself.

The next morning I woke with that horrible feeling that something very bad might have happened. I rang Brendan hoping I had dreamed the entire episode.

I hadn't.

This is where a great PA becomes invaluable. Even though it was Saturday, Janet answered the phone, immediately took control and started repairing the damage. By the time I appeared at reception at about 10 am, the same ladies called me over to thank me for their hotel upgrade, and the private taxi transfer Janet had arranged.

Although one of them did offer me some excellent management advice:

"Less of the nakedness, sonny."

A year or so later, two girls from our sales Department were caught by the Sun Newspaper flashing by the swimming pool on an Airtours educational. I was instructed to sack them immediately.

Naturally, I told the Board that I had, but in reality, I quietly transferred them to our Accrington call centre.

After all, having survived my own stupidity, I was hardly in a position to destroy somebody else's career for theirs.

Businesses need rules, and managers have a responsibility to enforce them. But people also make mistakes, particularly when they are young, ambitious and occasionally drunk in Magaluf.

Sometimes good management isn't about deciding who deserves punishment.

It's remembering who once gave you a second chance