FORMER MyTravel deputy chief operating officer Steve
Endacott was forced to ditch a controversial attack on the operator after
lawyers warned he could be sued over the derogatory comments.
He was advised to drop several critical observations
from his speech just hours before he addressed the Scottish Passenger Agents’
Association annual dinner.
Endacott, who is still receiving a salary from
MyTravel after leaving last September, said he only decided to heed the advice
moments before his speech.
“Did I lose my bottle? Yes. Was it right not to
include critical comments? Yes. It was too much of a risk.”
Any disparaging remarks would not only have alerted
MyTravel’s legal team but may also have breached his contract and threatened
future payments.
However, Endacott did say in his speech any company
that saw so many top-level executives leave would inevitably struggle.
“Careers are about timing – and mine is very poor,” he
said. “Within six weeks of returning to MyTravel the proverbial had hit the fan
and the share price hit the depths. The crucial issue was senior management had
left, three of them to Thomson.”
Earlier, he said Airtours’ annual 30%-40% growth in
the 1990s was a “seat of the pants job”.
“If we had an idea, we did it. If it didn’t work, we
stopped. We took risks,” he said.
He admitted initially the “quality was crap” and the
operator “stacked it high and sold it cheap”, a situation it started to address
in the mid 1990s.
Observers said Airtours’ problems were not rooted in
the UK business, but in its ill-advised entry into Canada and Germany.