Festive Road Co-Founders to Diverge

U.K.-based corporate travel consultancy Festive Road will split into two independent businesses at the end of March. Caroline Strachan will take Festive Road forward as an independent travel buyer consultancy and outsourcing provider. Strachan will be the majority shareholder in the business and will take the title of CEO. The Festive Road leadership team and all employees will remain.

Paul Tilstone, as of March 29, will officially boot up a supply-side consultancy called Temoji that, according to a press release, will focus on marketing, communications and advisory services in the supplier sector to build “social and intellectual capital” between suppliers and their audiences. Tilstone told BTN in an interview prior to the release that Temoji would particularly focus on face-to-face interactions between suppliers and their buyer audiences via customer advisory board facilitation, workshopping events and innovative in-person forums. 

But overall, he said, Temoji wants to help suppliers key into the ‘emotive’ piece of travel, whether that’s in their overall strategy of connecting with the corporate market, specific sales or marketing strategies and down to account management strategy.

Tilstone said the supply-side advisory of the Festive Road business had been largely supported by contractor relationships, and everyone in that piece of the Festive Road support system would have the opportunity to continue to contract with Temoji. 

The fork in the road for Festive was a feeling of missed opportunities if the two businesses were to stay together, said Strachan. 

“The real opportunity now is to be 100 percent independent as a buyer consultancy and 100 percent independent as a supplier consultancy. And there’s two reasons for that,” she said. “We’ve spent a lot of time saying ‘no’ over the last eight years to suppliers because we so heavily protect the buyer interest—and you can imagine the types of conflicts of interest that can come up [when you are working with both the buyer and supplier sides]… 

“That limited how much supplier consulting we could really do. So Paul, now with Temoji, can pursue the opportunity … to create a bigger set of services for the supplier community,” Strachan said. 

“The second opportunity is to be 'the' independently-owned consultancy in the buyer space across travel management, outsourcing, category management and consulting,” Strachan said. “Having someone truly independent managing those vendors is fundamentally different to some other offers that are out there in the marketplace.”

Both Strachan and Tilstone said there would be no bridge or relationship between the two companies. Festive Road did not disclose specific financial terms of the split but did indicate that the buyer-side consultancy piece comprised 90 percent of the concern, while the supply-side of the business, which Tilstone will transition to Temoji, comprised 10 percent of the business.