Uniworld snaffles departing helloworld.com.au CEO

Uniworld snaffles departing helloworld.com.au CEO

Boutique river cruise operator Uniworld has secured the services of former helloworld.com.au CEO Jeremy Reitman, Travel Weekly can exclusively confirm.

Reitman will take on the role of Chief Marketing Officer, starting May 11 in Uniworld’s Los Angeles office. He joins fellow Helloworld departee Fiona Dalton, who commenced her role this week as Managing Director for Uniworld based in Australia.

Yesterday, Travel Weekly broke the news that the online arm of the Helloworld empire, helloworld.com.au, would soon be operating without its CEO Jeremy Reitman.

Speculation around Reitman’s role had been ongoing since mid April, however Helloworld refused to comment about the move or any changes in leadership at the online company. Travel Weekly have since learnt Reitman resigned from his post prior to Andrew Burnes sharing his new strategy for helloworld.com.au and the broader Helloworld business.

Reitman had been at the helm of Helloworld’s online business since February 2014, his placement announced on the eve of the closure of the popular bestflights.com.au and bestcruises.com.au websites. Reitman was appointed by ex-Helloworld chief executive Rob Gurney following a tenure at Expedia where he was director of digital marketing.

Only weeks ago current chief executive Andrew Burnes announced helloworld.com.au would transition to a new platform from August 31, cutting its strategic alliance with Orbtiz Worldwide.

Burnes said that the strategic alliance between Helloworld and Orbitz had not delivered the revenue streams initially envisaged by both parties and had created too much conflict with Helloworld’s branded and associate members.

“The financial investment by Helloworld Limited in its development is over $18 million to date and between the ongoing losses of the .com operation and the channel conflict with the online site carrying the same brand as our branded and associate members, we have decided to transition the site to a more agent-aligned portal” Burnes said on the April 21 announcement.

Burnes said he “stands by his opinion that it is the groups’ responsibility to drive business in the door of our agency members, onto the phones of our agency members and onto the portals of our agency members including Helloworld.com.au”.

The operation has been costing approximately $6m a year over the last two years plus capital expenditure.

Email the Travel Weekly team at traveldesk@travelweekly.com.au

    Latest comments
    1. After reading these figures I just cannot believe that someone personally is not being held accountable for the decision making process. Shutting down a profitable $200 Million business has to be one of the craziest business decisions ever to only go and waste money like this and not succeed is ludicrous. Good on you Mr Burnes for taking this role on and actually trying to sort out the mess it is all in. Very strange for all this to go on and not be declared to shareholders, after all it is a publically listed company. I guess it would make a good documentary or book as it all starts to unravel.

    2. Poor Helloworld Franchisees, and Affiliates, their change of leaders is worse than the Australian Government, and that’s saying something!! Flighties keep powering on, and I was one of their competitors

    3. Finding the Helloworld website is easy but the company also needs to build a separate website/s based around what it is people are looking for using an umbrella domain name. Inside there should be specific individual pages relating to search terms people are using eg. “Cheap flights”, Discount Flights”,” Discount Airfares”, “Best Airfares”, Best Flights” etc to each of the main destinations. In the Australian winter the northern hemisphere sells and in the summer it’s the opposite. Eg build a page/s who’s title might be ” Discount Airfares Sydney to London”. Another page could be “Cheap Airfares Sydney to London” and so on using the different type of airfare term people are using from all the major cities in Australia. Bali is a big seller right now so a typical search term might be “Bali Travel Specials” and Helloworld doesn’t even rate a first page listing looking at Google just now. It is littered with paid adverts but with good web building and search engine optimisation and techniques it should be possible to get a first page listing without having to pay for it. This is where HW is falling down as I see it. Years ago I was search engine manager for the only travel and tourism search engine in Australia. After I left I built a 100+ page website from home that advertised nothing but travel deals, travel specials and airfares using a killer domain name and passed the enquiries onto chosen travel agents. This was in the days FC used the term, “Lowest Airfares Guaranteed” and I stumbled across the secret to website optimisation by accident and built several pages using the term “Our Lowest Airfares Guaranteed Competitive” and my page had a first page listing above FC. At any given time I could see who was looking at my site via my stats and they were there regularly sniffing around. I could do all the website changes myself instantly and didn’t have to pay $85 per hour to a webmaster. With no advertising or paying big money for listings I was on page one for so many important search terms to popular destinations. Don’t get sucked in by experts telling you you need their website optimisation services. They make it out to be super tricky but really, there is no trick to it at all as I found out. I had the site for 7 years and regularly got over 1000 visitors each day. So many people asked me, “How do you get so many visitors?” and I said, “Build pages for what people are looking for and they will come and find you”. Don’t rely on the Helloworld webpage to feed your agents because it will never happen unless you do something similar. It aint rocket science.

Andrew Burnes bestflights.com.au helloworld helloworld.com.au jeremy reitman

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