Tuesday, October 09, 2007

New Boss and Execs at Viator - promotion for Barrie Seidenberg and Board role for Chris Vukelich

With all my travelling last week and eye on the WHOOT I missed the news that Rod Cuthbert the founder of destination services company Viator has moved to a corporate strategy role as Executive Chairman of the company to make way for new CEO Barrie Seidenberg. Seidenberg has been President of the group since 2005. She has an important place in the history of online travel as she was previously CMO of Preview Travel. Preview is famous as the first big deal in online travel when it was bought by/merged with Travelocity in 1999 (completed in 2000) to make a company that I think was was first to hit the combined $1billion in gross bookings mark. Certainly first to hit $2bil.

In the same release comes news that ex Hilton, BA and Cendant exec Chris Vukelich has joined the Viator Board.

Thanks to Martin Kelly at traveltrends.biz where I first spotted the story.