On June 26, a lone gunman walked onto a beach near Sousse in Tunisia and murdered 38 people. Thirty of the victims were British. All of them, Thomson customers.

“I won’t lie,” Longman admits. “There were one or two moments when I just had to step outside the office, take a deep breath and clear my head and just think about what we were going to do… The business needed really clear leadership at that point.” In the aftermath of the killing the company went into crisis mode.

The website’s traditional turquoise colours were changed to a muted grey, and extra planes were sent over to bring back customers who wanted to return home. “I think the good thing is we’re a big organisation; we’re well schooled in dealing with crises so we have really good procedures [and] we have really good people… the business knows how to cope with these types of incidents,” he says.

“There were one or two moments when I had to step outside the office, take a deep breath and clear my head and just think about what we were going to do”

Nick Longman on hearing the news about the Sousse attacks

Just five months on, and Tui – along with many other travel firms – is experiencing a similar problem in Egypt.

A suspected bomb attack on a Russian charter airline last month led to increased security at Sharm el Sheikh, with British carriers currently banned from flying to the resort. Longman was speaking to TTG in the days immediately after the incident, but he was keen to stress the company would not be making any kneejerk reactions.

Should the crisis continue, however, the problem of what to do with the group’s aircraft will likely come up.

“It really will be the Canaries or Cape Verde [where we place them]. We can look to extend seasons in other countries so Cyprus or Greece we could start earlier, but that won’t run all the way through. “You’re fairly limited in terms of flying for five hours and under, [for destinations] that you can do.”

Like other operators, Tui is bound by government advice. In Tunisia’s case the entire country is currently off limits, with the situation unlikely to have been improved by events in Egypt and Paris last weekend. “I don’t think [Egypt] will have been helpful to Tunisia’s cause because it just puts another dampner on North Africa,” Longman admits.

“We said we would cancel [our Tunisia programme until] March 22, 2016. I’m still optimistic we will start it up again, but it will be much smaller.”

Long game

Tunisia and Egypt are both relatively well-established short-to-mid-haul destinations, but increasingly Tui’s focus has been on expanding its holiday horizons.

The decision to commit to investing in the Boeing 787 Dreamliner – the company now owns eight, with plans to add a further nine by 2019 – has enabled it to seek out destinations that previously would have been economically unviable. This includes Costa Rica, which begins this winter, as well as Sri Lanka, which will be added to Tui’s programme next year.

“Over the past five years, we’ve sought to remix our product portfolio. We’ve moved out of flight-only, we’ve moved out of the more value, commodity types of holidays and we’ve [gone] into differentiated and exclusive [products], and that’s served us very well.

“I don’t think [Egypt] will have been helpful to Tunisia’s cause because it just puts another dampner on North Africa,”

Nick Longman

“But we now need to grow the top line; we need to send more passengers to new places,” he says. “Long-haul in particular is a focus for us. You shouldn’t be in this industry if you’re not excited at the prospect of taking people to Sri Lanka, Costa Rica and a number of new destinations that we’re looking at.” He envisages adding one or two destinations a year and is working on new ones for summer 2017.

Alongside the destination planning, Longman is however facing something potentially more disruptive. Parent company Tui Group has stipulated that all country sub-brands will disappear over the coming years, to be replaced by its one overarching group name of Tui. The move has drawn plenty of criticism but Longman believes it will ultimately benefit the UK business.

The name Tui according to Longman is viewed in a more “contemporary way” than Thomson. “It’s absolutely the right thing to do for the business. Thomson is a great brand, it’s got great heritage but we are an international business, we run our business in an international way, and it makes sense for us to change so that we’re all Tui.”

Staying fresh

Although he is not a newcomer at Tui, Longman is determined to bring in some fresh ideas. One area he believes the company could improve on is promoting young talent, and it is for this reason that he is so impassioned about TTG’s 30 Under 30 initiative, and why he decided to speak at TTG’s Tomorrow’s Travel Leaders conference next week. “We’ve got a great top team but I want to bring that next team up.”

He adds: “I remember being told 10 years ago: ‘You’re in a group of people now in the travel industry who can come through and replace the Mannys [Fontenla-Novoa] the Peters [Long] and the Dermots [Blastland]’… I seem to have gone from being in [that] young group,” he laughs.

Longman’s other focus will be on innovation – something that he sees as essential given the number of new companies trying to take business away from Tui. Former digital director Jeremy Osborne has been elevated to the UK and Ireland board with a specific innovation remit. “I would be disappointed if we couldn’t bring one or two things to market within the next year that were different and would delight our customers. That’s really what I want to focus on,” he says.

Alongside established competitors such as Thomas Cook and Kuoni, Tui is now fighting with the likes of Airbnb and Booking.com over customers. These newcomers offer up something that traditionally vertically integrated tour operators could not: flexibility.

Travellers are no longer as wedded to the traditional 7, 10 and 14-night holidays they once were. As a way of offering more choice, Tui launched third-party flying in 2014. However, rather than customers flying out from different airports, Longman says he was surprised to find people were flying out from the same places, just on different dates. He even suggests Tui could become involved in the booming homestay sector: “Will we offer accommodation like that? That’s something that could be feasible in certain destinations. You can never be closed to any opportunity really.”

Risk taking, however, is something which Longman feels particularly strongly about. He had a secure job at accountancy firm Deloitte before jumping ship to First Choice. And as the quickly evolving world of online and the changing face of travel continues to present new disruptions, it seems Longman’s bold attitude will stand him – and Tui’s UK business – in good stead.

“It was a risk to leave Deloitte,” he admits. “It was a risk to move to Canada when I did in 2002. It was a risk to take the job of integration director because I had no guarantee of another job in the organisation.

But I don’t think you’re going to move your career on [if you don’t take risks],” he adds with a smile. “It’s good to test yourself.”