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New senior vice president EMEA, Cressida Sergeant, to leverage her global experience with major brands including Expedia and TravelSupermarket.com to maximise travel tech firm’s regional growth potential.
Traveltek Group Ltd has appointed well-known industry identity Cressida Sergeant to spearhead its ambitious expansion campaign across the UK, Europe and Middle East.
The high-profile travel professional, who has held senior positions with leading travel brands including Expedia, TravelSupermarket.com, Lastminute.com and The Global Travel Group, has joined the travel technology firm as senior vice president EMEA, effective immediately, which completes the company’s recently-announced sales management team restructure.
Sergeant comes on board as Traveltek pursues aggressive growth plans, responsible for leading a business development strategy that will maximise the firm’s potential in every EMEA market, based on her extensive global experience across all aspects of the travel business including B2B, B2C, online, metasearch and more.
“Cressida joins Traveltek at one of the most exciting moments in our 20-year history as we scale-up the business in the UK and major international markets to unprecedented levels,” said Kenny Picken, President & CEO, Traveltek Group Ltd.
“With her unrivalled industry experience, in-depth market knowledge and strong commercial, strategic and leadership skills, proven with some of the biggest names in travel, I am confident Cressida will identify opportunities to expand our market reach like never before, and I wish her every success.”
Sergeant joins Traveltek from Kognitiv Corporation, where she was senior vice president of sales & partnerships. Prior to that, she was senior director business development EMEA for Expedia’s fast-growing B2B brand EAN, leading a team that successfully pursued business opportunities in new geographies and sectors.
At TravelSupermarket.com she led the commercial partnership and display advertising team, negotiating with OTAs, tour operators, hotel chains, bed banks and ancillary providers, while her role as head of commercial at The Global Travel Group provided Sergeant with insight into the travel agency business and supplier partnerships.
“Given my diverse and extensive experience in the EMEA travel market I believe I can add value to Traveltek, joining at a time when I can help scale up the business and lay the foundations for growth,” said Sergeant.
“It is a dynamic company with an entrepreneurial spirit and there are phenomenal opportunities to take its industry-leading technology to a much wider audience.”
Prospects include providing airlines, cruise lines, hotels and other travel brands with dynamic packaging solutions and access to Traveltek’s vast database of travel agents to enable them to better compete with online providers. At the same time, the tech firm can help OTAs take advantage of untapped cruise business, according to Sergeant.
“Every market has different needs and we will adopt individual strategies for each,” she revealed. “I’m also looking forward to introducing Traveltek’s upcoming product upgrades to new and existing markets too.”
Sergeant is responsible for a six-strong sales team including Monika Holland, vice president sales Europe, who is based in The Netherlands; Neil Welsh, head of sales, EMEA and two business development managers – Stuart Charles and Oliver Chesterton – who work out of the UK; and two regional sales managers MENA, Liam Butcher and Abir Aly, based at Traveltek’s Dubai office.
She joins two other regional SVPs on Traveltek’s senior sales management team. Francis Riley was appointed SVP for the Americas at the end of last year and is based at Traveltek’s US headquarters in Miami and Paul Millan was recently promoted from regional director to SVP Asia Pacific and divides his time between the company’s Singapore, Sydney and Hong Kong offices.
