Jet2holidays leapfrogged its rival to become the UK’s largest tour operator by Atol size last month – after new figures confirmed the Leeds-based business is licensed to carry 5,859,600 passengers this year – 523,190 more than Tui UK.

Speaking to TTG this week, Andrew Flintham said he believed trying to determine which operator was truly the UK’s market leader using such figures was a matter of “conjecture or prediction”.

“When you look at the UK market, there aren’t really any market share figures, there isn’t any official data anymore. Atol is a prediction of what you will sell – not what you’ve sold – and nobody ever really goes back and checks a company’s Atol to see if they sold what they said they would,” he said.

“The fact Jet2 have claimed the crown by saying they’re going to sell more – they haven’t claimed the crown by actually selling more. Only history will say if they do, or if they don’t… it’s not quite clear and it may never be clear who is actually the biggest.”

Flintham claimed “customers don’t care if you’re number one or number two – they just want a great holiday”, adding how Tui “hadn’t seen a fundamental change” in its online traffic and was “trading really strongly across our retail estate and third-party agents”.

“When you look at traffic, we still have what I would call a strong market-leading position,” he said. “I think what’s important is what customers think of you – customers, rather than the industry.

“[Being the largest] doesn’t matter to consumers but it matters to us. We measure our customers’, and our competitors’ customers’, trust metrics, brand preferences and brand considerations, and, in most circumstances, ours are the strongest they’ve ever been.”

Flintham said he agreed with comments made by Jet2 chief executive Steve Heapy that the operator “didn’t want to be number one but wanted to be the best”.  “Being the best is more important but I don’t agree with Steve that they’re the best – clearly, we are,” he said.

“What you can say is, between the two of us, we are the vast proportion of the industry now. We’re quite different businesses and have quite different strategies going forwards. We’re more around breadth of products and services and they are much more focused in terms of package holidays.

“It’s going to be the customers to vote with their feet and maybe at the end of the summer we’ll all know who sold more when actually it comes down to it.”