Manuel Mascarenhas (pictured), European managing director of Wendy Wu Tour’s Chinese destination management company, Inbound China, has left the company to pursue other opportunities.
Mascarenhas had been in the role for a year following three and a half years as managing director of Wendy Wu Tours in the UK.
Wendy Wu, the founder, said: “We are very sorry to lose Manuel and, in thanking him for all he has done for us, we would like to wish him well in his future career.”
Inbound China will now be integrated into the Wendy Wu Tours business, under the helm of managing director Laurence Hicks.
Hicks told Travel Weekly: “We have recently moved into larger offices at London Bridge and have the perfect environment to be able to carry on the work that Manuel started.”
Hicks said Wendy Wu Tours sales in the UK were up 20% year on year, with revenue up 26%. Most business comes through travel agents.
He added that a promotion offering free upgrades with Air China for the second half of January this year had resulted in a 40% increase in January sales.
Wendy Wu Tours, which is best-known for China tours, also offers tours in Indo-China and Hicks revealed that business to the region had jumped 15% since it had rebranded its brochure to have the same look and feel as the China programme.
Looking to the future, Hicks revealed the group had just appointed a “high level e-commerce specialist” to help the company “catch up with the rest from a tech perspective”, including making booking easier for agents and customers, he said.
“He will also be helping us to improve our marketing; embracing social networks and media; and making our websites more user-friendly to give people the best journeys through the darkness that people perceive China to be.”
Hicks revealed he was also in talks with all the GDSs about global distribution.
“We are not selling through any GDSs at the moment but we need to make China a much easier product to book as it’s going to boom in the coming years.
“We need to make it much more accessible and give people much more choice. The escorted tours market is still very strong and solid, but there are other types of travel to China and as the largest specialist to the country, we need to find a way to help people book them.
“So we are exploring things with the GDSs, but tours are very different to what they currently feature and so we need the right platforms,” he said.