Travelzest has appointed Expedia’s director of retail Robin Sutherland as managing director for its revamped website Holiday.co.uk.
Sutherland, who was instrumental in shaping Expedia’s retail and merchandising strategy and its dynamic packaging model, joins on April 23.
Holiday.co.uk was recently relaunched by Travelzest as one of its core sales channels, advertising its own operators’ products. The site aims to have dynamic packaging capability within a year and has already ditched the brand names of tour operators selling packages on the site because they were driving traffic to rival sites.
Group chief executive Chris Mottershead said: “We are delighted to have attracted someone of Robin’s calibre to lead the ongoing development of holiday.co.uk online portal. Robin’s experience will be invaluable to further defining the strategy for this business and driving traffic towards the group’s specialist tour operators’ websites.”
Sutherland, who said he left Expedia after more than five years for a new challenge, added: “I believe there is an exciting opportunity to create something different that offers travellers and holidaymakers a wide range of choices including the ability to book specialist, tailormade holidays on the Internet.”
Sutherland previously worked as director of customer analytics at Expedia, and before that was customer relationship manager at TheFirstResort.com and in market analysis roles for British Airways among others.