TUI Netherlands, Belgium merge

AMSTERDAM - Today it was announced that TUI Netherlands and TUI Belgium, operating under the British TUI Travel PLC, will merge together as from the 1st of January 2014. Elie Bruyninckx, the current CEO of TUI Belgium, will become CEO of the new Dutch-Belgium travel organization. The current CEO of TUI Netherlands, Steven van der Heijden, will leave TUI Netherlands as from the 1st of March 2014. He is now talking with TUI Travel PLC about a possible new position within the TUI Group. The new travel organisation will be managed by a Dutch-Belgium management.
The goal of TUI Travel PLC is to turn from different country organisations into one integrated international company. Keywords are: efficiency, scale, respond to changes faster together and avoid identical investments in different countries. Furthermore, there is a collective definition of optimal client experience, which is a basis for international development of new products and services. Based on above starting points, different TUI country organisations will be clustered. Besides Belgium and Holland, this also goes for Germany, Switzerland, Austria and Poland. Great-Britain and Ireland already are a cluster, as well as the four Scandinavian countries Sweden, Norway, Finland and Denmark. Besides that, the core subjects within the company will be managed more central on TUI Travel PLC level. This will be regarding the following subjects: Aviation, Product & Purchasing, Distribution & Online, Destination Organisation and IT (Digital Transformation. This means that various management members, also in The Netherlands and Belgium, will have two parties to report to. Commercially, they keep reporting to their CEO and on operational level they will also report to members of the international TUI Mainstream Board.