TTG Toolkit TECHNOLOGY
A refreshing approach
38 This week in your toolkit
TTG On Tour Find out where you can meet us in the third of our block- busting roadshow series p31
Marketing Insight from The Travel Marketing Network on appealing to older travellers p33
Good Business Meet the runners who’ll be pounding the pavement in aid of Abta LifeLine p34
Training
Spice up your vanilla island sales, plus win Travel Brits tickets p36
31 team toolkit
Got any business-related issues you’d like TTG to cover? Email
toolkit@ttgdigital.com
Mystery shopper Selling a same-sex ceremony in New York p38
From student days side project to major corporate travel player – and TTG Travel Award winner – Click Travel’s co-founder and managing director Simon McLean tells Matthew Parsons how technology gives it the edge over rivals
U
niversity student writes software for a website for fellow students, from his dormitory room.
Said website spreads fast, and goes on to become a multi-million pound business.
Sound familiar? While Simon McLean may not
have been a Harvard sophomore like Mark Zuckerberg (he studied engineering at Cambridge), Click Travel shares a similar story to Facebook. In 1997, then-engineering student Simon McLean built a website to help students book hotels. Not really enjoying his degree,
McLean saw it as a bit of fun, as a side project, using an iMac. “There were quite a few bookings coming through, then my mother, who worked in a hotel, mentioned
the magic word ‘commission’,” McLean recalls. “Hotels sent us cheques. It was great – beer money!” In 1999, McLean incorporated the
company, choosing the name Miss Marple “because it helped people find hotels, like a detective”. “It wasn’t meant as a cashcow, I was just enjoying it,” he says. But after McLean worked out how
search engines worked, in the pre- Google era, his website started to gain traction with the public, and eventually a small company took notice. “They said: ‘Can you book for our
staff?’” and it was at that point that I realised it was easier to get volume through companies. McLean’s brother James then joined,
from an aerospace company, and shortly after Miss Marple was approached by Carphone Warehouse.
Matthew Parsons 020 7921 8015
28
Pippa Jacks 020 7921 8038
24.05.2012
Katherine Lawrey 020 7921 8018
Carlie Trotter 020 7921 8004
Darryl McGarvey (far left), national sales manager at Click Travel, picked up the business travel award at last year’s TTG Travel Awards
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