Thorpe was previously head of e-commerce at Thomas Cook UK, and has been recruited to lead the expansion of the brand under its new owners, Truly Holdings.  

Alpharooms, a specialist in discount accommodation from four-star hotels to all-inclusive holidays, has been trading for 18 years and was added to the Truly Travel group in November 2016. Its portfolio includes 250,000 properties in 40 destinations worldwide. 

Truly Travel, which provides holidays on an exclusive basis to teletextholidays.co.uk, combined together with alpharooms.com claims it will serve nearly one million holidaymakers in 2016-17.

 Truly Travel director Kumar Edara said: “The additional distribution via the alpharooms.com online platform is highly complementary to the phone-to-book distribution we have via our long-term partnership with teletextholidays.co.uk. It has more than doubled our hotel purchasing volumes, allowing us to deliver more customers to both our bed bank and direct hotel partners, which is crucial to securing the market-leading hotel rates that will drive our continued expansion.”

Thorpe added: “Having headed up online at Thomas Cook for three years, I was looking for a new challenge and I felt that the opportunity presented to me by alpharooms.com was complementary to my skill set.

"I’m very much looking forward to driving growth in the dynamic packaging side of alpharooms.com which has until now been focused on hotel-only sales.

"With advertising costs continuing to escalate, it has never been more important to maximise revenue by selling flights, transfers and other ancillaries as well as accommodation. We see the potential for a lot of growth by simply expanding operations in this way," said Chris Thorpe.