THE TRAVEL agency business that spun out of troubled Minoan Group at the end of last year has unveiled plans to expand its business travel offering with the appointment of an operations manager in the north-east.
Donald Munro, who previously spent 14 years at corporate travel management company Clarity Travel Management, has joined Stewart Travel’s Inverurie office and will take responsibility for developing its roster of business clients.
READ MORE: Minoan’s debt cut to £1m as lender buys travel agency
Craig Patterson, director of corporate travel at Stewart Travel, said the firm is focusing on the north-east business sector, which was badly hit in the wake of the oil-price slump, because it is “really motoring again”.
“We’re picking up a really exciting range of new clients from all sorts of sectors and now feature some of the country’s fastest growing businesses on our roster. That’s why we need more staff - to grow on that success,” he said.
The business that started out as Stewart Travel Agency was originally acquired by Minoan in 2012 before being bolstered with the addition of Classic Travel and Morningside Travel.
READ MORE: Minoan’s travel arm in good health ahead of expected sell-off
It was handed over to Minoan Group’s lender, Zachary Asset Holding, last October as a means of repaying most of an £8.3 million debt that started out as a £5m loan forwarded in October 2013. Minoan managing director Duncan Wilson and Stewart Travel senior managers Rick Green and Brian Cassidy retained a 25 per cent stake in the travel agency as part of that deal.
In November, the management team bought out the firm, with finance for the deal supplied by Zachary and HSBC.
Minoan is now focusing on its development of a luxury resort on the Greek island of Crete.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here