Unveiling 2023 results, Tui Group chief executive Sebastian Ebel said: “When I came into office, I said I was a fan of retail. The customer value for a retailer is significantly higher. That is why we went back into retail. 

“We are very happy to work with third party retailers, they justify it because they sell higher margin products. We have to pay more, but the benefit we get is compensating.”

Tui has been criticised by some independent UK agents for seeking their support again after years of directing sales in-house. However, Ebel said 95% of agents were happy with Tui.

“The 5%, it’s always good to learn where they are unhappy. In the last 12 months we’ve made huge progress. If there are any issues a retailer has, come back to us, we want to learn where we’re not good enough.”

Ebel said agents also represented good value compared with some online channels, adding he planned to persuade more of Tui’s web customers to switch to its new direct channel instead. 

“Google costs have gone up. We want to bring the web customer into the app because then we buy the customer only once.”

However, he added: “We know we get the better customer with the retailer,” and promised to make more ancillary products available to agents.

Ebel said the Tui app would enable global sales of its product modelled on other giant brands like Amazon. “We have started to capture customer lifetime value. Our great example is Amazon and we are following the same path to increase the wallet share of our customer.” The UK version would be fully operational by the end of 2024, he said.

The app’s effectiveness will be helped by a new centralised customer database. “In the past, if you booked cruise or a hotel, we could cross-sell but it was a manual process. Now we have all customer data in one and we can do cross-marketing and upselling. The interaction with the customer will be more intensive and we will decrease distribution costs.”

He added: “Everybody thinks Tui is a dinosaur in Europe, now we are going into gazelle mode growth and want to get out of Europe. The next step will be North America.

"The Tui of today is not the Tui of tomorrow. Today we are strong European player, we want to be a global player."