Trade-only bedbank Bedswithease today confirmed that Paul Riches is joining as sales director
Riches, who takes up the role on November 14, has held similar positions at Lowcostbeds as global sales director and more recently Youtravel as chief sales officer.
He will join the existing team at the £50 million-turnover business, headed by general manager, Franco Leto, who has been with the company since 2007.
Managing director, Adam Pardini, said: “I have had various discussions with Paul over the years around joining us and am delighted he has agreed to spearhead the business and drive sales forward.
“This is a perfect time for someone of Paul’s experience to come on board, in order to now help us with our ambitious growth plans.
“There is an obvious gap in the market and we intend to exploit this and deliver what travel agents really need. Bedswithease has only ever been B2B and will continue to support its trade partners fully.”
Riches added: “I’m delighted to be joining the team at Bedswithease at such an exciting time.
“One of our key objectives will be to understand what our UK trade partners want from us, and then set out to deliver this for them in order to grow our mutual business substantially in the next few years.
“Whilst we have some excellent existing relationships with some key OTAs, call centres and homeworking companies, we’ve been a bit under the radar with a number of the larger agency groups, who don’t appreciate quite how big we are. We now plan to let a few more agents know what we can offer them,” said Riches.
Bedswithease employs four destination managers based in Europe and will be recruiting two more over the next few months to expand the number of directly contracted hotels.