A former holiday rep who launched a travel recruitment firm, which is backed by former Dragon’s Den star James Caan, has moved into the UK market.
Sathya John set up Pronto Recruitment earlier this year and is now expanding with investment from Caan, a serial entrepreneur who founded investment firm Recruitment Entrepreneur in 2014.
Barcelona-based Pronto Recruitment started operations in Spain and western Europe and is now targeting the UK.
John started her 20-year travel career as a resort rep with Airtours Holidays which became part of the Thomas Cook Group. She worked her way up to become resort operations manager then spearheaded talent acquisition for new resort staff.
In 2014, John returned to London, joining The Travel Corporation (TTC) as contracts manager and also worked with TTC’s youth brand, Contiki.
She then worked for a company in Barcelona managing Airbnb’s customer service and expanded its European multilingual customer contact team from 100 full-time employees to more than 2,000 in less than two years.
John moved to another contact centre recruitment agency to develop its team in Iberia and other parts of Europe.
Earlier this year, she set up Pronto Recruitment, specialising in the hotels, aviation, cruise, transport, tour operations and travel tech sectors.
Joining Pronto Recruitment to help its expansion is Sasha Stokeli, business development manager, operating between Malaga, London and northwest England.
Stokeli has more than 14 years of experience in the travel industry, having worked for Thomas Cook, BH Mallorca, Jet2holidays and Booking.com.