The Interview
Andy Duncan, Travelopia
From butter to the Beeb, the ‘transformational chief executive’ is now making an impression in the travel industry. Lucy Huxley reports
B 12
eing the man who launched ‘I can’t believe it’s not butter!’ is some claim to fame.
Beating Sir Richard Branson to
sponsorship of the (Flora) London Marathon – and fending him off for 14 years – was also a bit of a coup. But Andy Duncan, chief executive
of Travelopia, has plenty of success stories across his varied career, which includes senior roles at Unilever, the BBC, Channel 4 and Camelot. It’s quite a CV and one of the
reasons Travelopia’s private equity backers, KKR, approached Duncan to run the business aſter it was sold by Tui in 2017.
Stellar career Duncan, who is known in leadership circles as a ‘transformational chief executive’, says: “Tui’s Specialist Holidays Group was non-core to Tui and hadn’t been a strategic priority since the 1990s. It was a neglected part of the business with not much financial investment.
10 OCTOBER 2019
“KKR got a good deal, but it was
a very fragmented, mixed bag, all run as individual local businesses.” Duncan says KKR was atracted
to his consumer, technology and marketing skills, which he honed across a number of big roles. Aſter 17 years at Unilever, and
when his two daughters were small, Duncan decided he didn’t want to work for the same company all his life. So he joined the BBC and led the launch of the corporation’s digital channels and Freeview. Aſter three years, he moved to Channel 4 where he was chief executive for six years, growing the channel’s market share and winning loads of awards, including eight Oscars for Film4’s Slumdog Millionaire. He was also presiding over the channel during the Big Brother Jade Goody v Shilpa Shety race row, describing his tenure as “great but remarkable times”. Aſter a short spell at HR Owen,
the UK’s largest luxury car dealership, he joined the National Lotery run by Camelot, presiding over its digital transformation; it remains the largest
digital lotery in the world. Duncan says: “All my roles have
been commercial or for public benefit, or a nice hybrid. Travelopia is sort of the same. It’s highly commercial, but it has a social purpose because we are selling a holiday product, which is a lovely thing to be involved in. “Te job is about brand,
marketing, digital and people, which is everything that I love. And I have always had a real passion for travel.” Duncan pauses to tell me about
his own wanderlust. Aſter working at Camp America aged 18, he spent four months at a Mother Teresa mission in Kolkata, and has been to Ethiopia three times in the last two years.
“I went to support a Christian
charity, Tearfund, and fell in love with it. It’s a remarkable country. It has very gentle, striking people and beautiful countryside,” he says, showing me videos of gelada baboons in the Simien Mountains.
Travelopia He has been at Travelopia for 18 months. When he joined, it had 53 brands. “Tey ranged from some really standout brands, to some mediocre ones and some that just didn’t fit with the rest of the group,” he says. “Most were making some money, so they were commercially OK, but clearly an opportunity to grow.” Duncan recalls identifying the
My vision is to be the world’s best
experiential travel company. We’re already unique. There isn’t a company like ours with the breadth of experiences we offer
travelweekly.co.uk
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