Joining forces

Part of this is down to the success of the two main mergers – both overseen by Long – that have shaped the company.

In 2007 during one of the most memorable periods in travel industry history, First Choice, where Long was chief executive, merged with German-owned Tui. This all happened a couple of weeks after MyTravel and Thomas Cook agreed their own tie-up.

“We had a view as a board that we would either sell our mainstream business or [merge, but] the only business that we only wanted to merge with was [Tui].

“Sometimes events have to happen within an industry when it starts consolidating to then create the opportunity for further consolidation. And when Thomas Cook and [MyTravel] decided to merge, that immediately gave us the opportunity to do what we really wanted to do...”

For Long, the best thing about the merger was that both Tui and First Choice were of a similar mindset over something that has come to be increasingly more important for vertically integrated travel companies in the age of online competition: differentiated product.

“We were doing that at First Choice with Holiday Villages and Thomson was doing it within Tui with Sensatori, so both organisations had the same vision…” he says.

“In a digital world where there is complete price transparency, if you don’t have unique offerings there is no way that you can offer that differentiation.”

As Willie Walsh has done at British Airways, Long helped an old-fashioned business adapt to a completely new environment.

When he took his first travel job in 1984, the travel industry was still based largely on pen and paper.

As finance director at Intasun, which was part of legendary travel entrepreneur Harry Goodman’s International Leisure Group (ILG), Long saw the vast potential in making holidays more attainable.

“He was a man very much ahead of his time in terms of his vision in making overseas holidays affordable to a vast array of people that hitherto wouldn’t have been able to take breaks to the sun,” Long says.

His previous jobs were a long way from the thrill and excitement of selling package holidays. Long trained as an accountant before taking a job in the construction industry, which he then held for a decade. ILG was very different.

Locked in

“It was a very exciting time. In 1984 the business was growing fast and I got locked into the industry in a very positive way and have never looked back,” he says.

He was put in charge of the Intasun business before leaving ILG in the wake of its collapse to launch Sunworld in 1991. He sold the company to Thomas Cook in 1996 and joined First Choice.

The Crawley-based position was very different to anything Long had done before. When he joined as managing director of tour operations, the company was number three in an overcrowded market behind both Thomson and Airtours.

Although First Choice carried more than a million passengers a year, it had a market capitalisation of under £150 million and its share price stood at 49p. In Long’s words, it was “broken”.

Turnaround

“The first part of my task in First Choice was to improve the performance of the business and we set about a turnaround plan, which went well.

“The city supported it and very quickly the share price rose and that also gave us the opportunity to participate in the consolidation of the industry and particularly with a number of middle-sized operators...”

So First Choice started splashing the cash. It hoovered up Unijet and Hayes & Jarvis – helping it move into the long-haul market.

Having successfully transformed the company, Long was then appointed chief executive of First Choice in September 1999, where he spent the next decade dealing with potential suitors, including Airtours and Kuoni, before settling on a tie-up with Tui-owned Thomson in 2007.

Now, with Tui Group passing into the hands of Fritz Joussen, Long is likely to find he has a lot more time on his hands.

Some of this will be taken up by chairing the Royal Mail board, a position he has now held for four months. He could also still become chairman at Tui Group at some point in the future.

In the meantime, sixty-three year old Long is hoping to enjoy some holidays of his own.

“My wife and I are creatures of habit. We love the Maldives, we love Asia. So I guess particularly over this post-Christmas period when I won’t be worrying about bookings, it’s perhaps time to travel to that part of the world for a longer period.

“Rather than a two-week break, I can take three weeks or maybe even four, who knows.”