Nick Longman, managing director for UK and Ireland, told TTG Britain’s decision to leave the EU would not negatively impact the Tui brand in the UK prior to next year’s switchover – a decision he labelled the “biggest challenge in the company’s history”.

Britain will be the last of the German-owned group’s markets to experience the makeover, which is expected in the latter half of 2017.

“The rebrand was a good thing for many reasons and I don’t think Brexit will have an impact on that… people aren’t going to stop buying Mercedes or BMW cars and I think it will be the same with Tui,” Longman said.

“What I don’t want to have is a long, drawn out rebrand so once the date is confirmed we will start rebranding shops over the period of a couple of months.”

Longman disagreed when asked if the announcement by Thomson and First Choice to add 150,000 extra seats to the Balearics next summer could see the operator’s supply outweighing its demand should European holiday prices increase as expected.

“We buy in quite a lot of flying now as well so if the demand isn’t there then we could take it back. I don’t see Brexit changing anything.

“Will consumer sentiment be impacted? We don’t know when. We heard that Theresa May was going to become prime minister, the exchange rate started going up; what If I had cancelled a programme because two days ago it was three cents worse? You need to be really careful.”

During the launch, Longman also confirmed to TTG that Thomson Cruises would undergo a renaming post-rebrand. “I don’t think we could continue to call the cruise ships Thomson after the rebrand,” he added. “What exactly we’ll call them is something we need to just work out.”