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.