Under the agreement Sunhotels, Webjet’s European online accommodation business, will take responsibility for sourcing and contracting hotels that account for the majority of Thomas Cook’s complementary business.
LONDON – Thomas Cook, one of Europe’s leading holiday companies, announces the signing of a strategic hotel sourcing partnership with Webjet Limited, a leading online digital travel services provider.
Under the agreement Sunhotels, Webjet’s European online accommodation business, will take responsibility for sourcing and contracting hotels that account for the majority of Thomas Cook’s complementary business. This builds on the successful partnership that Sunhotels already has with Thomas Cook in its Nordic markets. As part of the new deal, Thomas Cook will transfer around 3,000 hotel contracts from across the group to Sunhotels. These will be added to Sunhotels’s existing hotel inventory of 75,000 hotels across the world which will also be offered to Thomas Cook as part of the agreement.
The partnership will allow Thomas Cook to focus on growing its core differentiated holiday offering while at the same time providing customers with a wider range and choice of complementary hotels in a more efficient way. Sunhotels will also take responsibility for managing an improved health and safety audit process, ensuring greater certainty and consistency in the quality of the customer offering.
The move represents an important step forward in Thomas Cook’s group-wide transformation programme, the New Operating Model. By moving the direct contracting for complementary hotels to a trusted partner, Thomas Cook will be able to better harmonise and simplify its IT platforms and business processes across its 15 source markets, delivering cost savings by reducing the complexity in its business.
Thomas Cook Chief Executive, Peter Fankhauser, said: “Entering this new relationship with Webjet will transform the way in which Thomas Cook offers a wide choice of hotels to customers. It provides us with a low-cost production platform for our complementary offer across all our source markets, enabling us to streamline our systems and processes while at the same time ensuring greater certainty over the quality of hotels that we offer our customers. This frees us up to focus on growing our differentiated holiday offering, the area where we know Thomas Cook can really make a difference.”
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