All Leisure Holidays is making up to 50 employees redundant, TTG has learned, as the group seeks to make its operations more efficient.
Group sales director Colin Wilson said the job losses followed a 30-day consultation in the run-up to Christmas.
He would not reveal the exact number, but redundancies requiring a 30-day consultation mean the number of jobs affected could be anywhere between 20 and 99. Wilson said the number was under 50, and that some would be voluntary.
The group employed around 330 staff in 2014-15, according to its latest accounts.
The job losses have largely been driven by the disbandment of its customer documentation team and specialist sales team as the company updates its systems and staff training.
Wilson admitted: “It’s been on the cards for about 18 months; it has just taken us longer [than expected] to get there.”
He said the documentation team, which had fewer than 10 members, had largely still been sorting and sending out customers’ paperwork manually, a practice which no longer exists.
“We’re now trying to automate it as much as we can,” he added. “That’s where we’ve had significant resources as we’ve had considerable staff numbers there.”
Meanwhile, he insisted the closure of the specialist sales team, which had around a dozen staff members, would enable All Leisure to offer better service to both agents and customers.
While the general sales team sold packages only, Wilson said the specialist team handled any changes to a trip, from a flight upgrade to bolting on additional nights as required. But he said the sales staff had all now been given the training required to personalise packages: “It will improve the service we offer to agents. We will see an improvement in how we process everything.”
Wilson said further changes would also help the operator better manage late bookings, with All Leisure now able to hold onto flight allocations for longer.
“We’ll be quite bullish and if we’ve got the product, we can sell up to the day before,” he added.