Simon Vincent: Is the world enough? The accidental tourist with banking in his blood

Given a choice of dates on which to launch a travel company, it's a safe bet to assume 12 September 2001 would languish close to the bottom of anyone's list. But that was when, for better or worse, Opodo officially came into being.

The online DIY holiday business was set up by nine airlines, including British Airways, to cash in on the growing popularity of travel websites - although they would have had far more pressing matters on their hands at that point than an internet venture.

"It was probably not the best time to launch an online travel company," muses Simon Vincent, who has been Opodo's chief executive since 2004.

Yet despite the knocks the industry has taken in recent years, online travel has survived and prospered. It was one of hundreds of sectors that blossomed during the tech boom of the late 1990s - and one of the very few to survive.

As consumers warmed to the idea of booking holidays online, rather than through travel agents, websites like Opodo went from strength to strength. Recently there has been a flurry of deals as the industry starts to consolidate. Travelocity, part of the US giant Sabre Holdings, last year beat Expedia to snap up lastminute.com for £577m, while another American group, Cendant, paid $404m (£219m) for ebookers.

Since joining the company, Vincent, 42, has expanded Opodo through the acquisition of five European businesses. It is now in nine European markets and has access to 500 airlines and 67,000 hotels. It offers car hire and, in France, a tour operator service. But it is still far smaller than other players and lacks the financial muscle of its US-owned rivals. In the last set of results filed at Companies House, for the year to 31 December 2004, turnover was up at €41.3m (£28m) while losses, although down 21 per cent on 2003, came in at €50.1m.

But Vincent sees Opodo's independence as a strong advantage. "We're the only pure- play European travel operator. We'll show these Americans a thing or two." He has also put in place a plan that, he claims, will see the business move into the black by the end of this year, mainly by increasing its scale. "The investment in technology and marketing has been quite significant but we've made progress: we've cut losses by more than half," he says.

"The UK market is tough: there's a lot of competition from the online players as well as emerging competition from the offline players [high-street operators]. So it's pretty cluttered. But we're looking to continue to expand our operations in continental Europe. The US is a tough market; we wouldn't enter on a standalone basis. There are better returns to be gained out of Eastern Europe, Asia and the Indian subcontinent."

Despite a lengthy spell working for Thomas Cook, you can't help feeling that Vincent's first love is deal-doing, rather than travel. Certainly, that was how his career started. Midland Bank International (now part of HSBC) sponsored his degree and he joined the bank on graduation. There he held various roles, including working as assistant to Hervé de Carmoy, Midland's head of global banking - "a charismatic Frenchman, an aristocrat", he fondly recalls.

It was through de Carmoy that Vincent entered the travel industry. Thomas Cook was at that stage owned by Midland, and de Carmoy was its chairman. "I was seconded for 12 weeks to work on an acquisition, and 12 years later I was still there."

He eventually became commercial director of the UK travel business but evidently couldn't let go of those deal-making roots: he was part of the team that sold Thomas Cook to its current German owner, C&N. Which is when it all went wrong for him. "It was a good time for me to leave. So I made an interesting career move and joined Red Letter Days. My brief was to float the business on AIM. But pretty quickly into my time there, I realised ..." He pauses. "I discovered some, shall we say, contingent liabilities on the balance sheet and I left pretty quickly. It was clear it wasn't going to float."

He left without another job to go to and it is obvious that his brief stay at the company, which offered activity gifts such as ballooning and racing car driving, was an unhappy one. He confirms he had a "pretty fundamental disagreement" with Red Letter's founder, Rachel Elnaugh, of TV's Dragon's Den fame, but won't be drawn - other than to say that he found its eventual collapse "pretty predictable".

His relationship with the owners of Opodo is emphatically better, despite some major changes. The founding airlines - Aer Lingus, Air France, Alitalia, Austrian Airlines, British Airways, Finnair, Iberia, KLM and Lufthansa - have sold down their stakes, now holding around 25 per cent between them. The rest of the company is controlled by the Spanish tech group Amadeus, which was last year acquired by the private equity firms Cinven and BC Partners in a €4.3bn deal.

"The new owners have so far been very supportive," says Vincent, although he doesn't claim to know what their long-term plans are for Opodo.

You don't get the feeling that travel is an all-consuming passion for Vincent ("it's a nice industry," he says rather weakly), but there's no doubting his commitment. He lives in Surrey but spends just two days a week in his west London office; the rest is taken up visiting operations in France, Scandinavia, Germany, Spain and Italy.

He travels for leisure as well, though not always as successfully. He is currently sporting a split lip following a wipeout on the slopes at Zermatt. He tells the story of his collision with relish, including how he sprayed the cable car with blood when "something sprung a leak" while he was making his way down the mountain. "All very gory. I had a blue jacket on and it just turned red," he says with a grin.

It is no bad thing that the skiing season is over, as Vincent has a busy agenda: expand Opodo, fight off its bigger US rivals and deliver it into profit. He believes the brand is a strong one, and even welcomes the occasional confusion with Ocado, Waitrose's online shopping service. ("It's a great service so I don't mind. We're kind of after the same target market.") No doubt he will achieve his plans for the company. But the question then for this wheeler-dealer is what sort of exit he will be looking for.

BIOGRAPHY

BORN 23 May 1963

EDUCATION

Degree in banking and international finance, The City University

CAREER

1986-87: corporate banking manager, Midland Bank International, Canada; later office manager to the chief executive of global banking

1988: joins Thomas Cook as a senior manager

1992: managing director, direct distribution

1996: commercial director

1998: managing director, JMC Holidays (part of Thomas Cook)

2000: chief operating officer, Thomas Cook UK

2001: managing director (tour operations), Thomas Cook

2002-03: chief executive, Red Letter Days

2004: chief executive, Opodo