GOING Places consultant Julie Morosco is planning a further 47 redundancies at the retailer in the first quarter of next year.
Morosco, working closely with new managing director Terry Fisher, has already made 80 job cuts across several departments (Travel Weekly, October 4). Among the current casualties are head of marketing Alison Flint. In a separate move, UKLG distribution director Peter Shanks has also been made redundant.
Although the 80 redundancies and supplier renegotiations are on target to save Going Places £5m per year, Morosco said more cuts are needed.
“There are 509 head office staff and the brief is to cut 25%, so there will be another 47 redundancies,” she said.
“We have a new finance director joining on January 1 and he will have a look at the department. There will also be cuts in IT and property but it depends on the number of extra shops we have.”
Shop numbers depend on Going Places’ efforts to buy Globus Group’s 25-strong chain Apollo Travel. Negotiations are currently taking place between Fisher and Globus chairman Fabio Mantegazza.
Morosco stressed there would be no redundancies in sales and said departments which had already been reviewed would not have any further changes. She added that she hoped to redeploy around 10% of the 80 staff elsewhere in the Airtours group.
Fisher said the changes would make the retailer slicker and improve relations between branch staff and head office.
“As a travel agent I understand their frustrations,” said Fisher. “Branch staff ring head office and get passed around eight help desks. Now there is one help desk for IT and one for everything else and problems get dealt with quickly.”
Morosco is also scrapping the controversial “pay and rewards scheme” and next year will offer staff a guaranteed basic wage plus incentives based on directional selling.
Meanwhile, Going Places’ parent Airtours announced pre-tax profits up 12% to £156.5m in the year to September 30. It also announced several management changes as predicted by Travel Weekly.
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