Riches left Youtravel last month, where he was chief sales officer, and he also previously held the position of global sales director at Lowcostbeds.

Riches will join Bedswithease on November 14.

He said: “I’m delighted to be joining the team at such an exciting time.

“One of our key objectives will be to understand what our UK trade partners want from us, and then set out to deliver this for them in order to grow our mutual business substantially in the next few years.”

The existing team at Bedswithease is headed by general manager Franco Leto.

Managing director Adam Pardini added: “I have had various discussions with Paul over the years around joining us and am delighted he has agreed to spearhead the business and drive sales forward.

“This is a perfect time for someone of Paul’s experience to come onboard, in order to now help us with our ambitious growth plans.

“There is an obvious gap in the market and we intend to exploit this and deliver what travel agents really need.

“Bedswithease has only ever been B2B and will continue to support its trade partners fully.”

The company currently employs four destination managers, based in Europe and will be recruiting two more experienced people to the team over the next few months, in order to expand the number of directly-contracted hotels.

Riches continued: “While we have some excellent existing relationships with some key OTAs, call centres and homeworking companies, we’ve been a bit under the radar with a number of the larger agency groups, who don’t appreciate quite how big we are.

“We now plan to let a few more agents know what we can offer them.”