Ocean Holidays Group Commits to Making Strides to Balance People, Planet and Profit as It Eyes Further Growth

Group unveils family-friendly policies, mental health support plus launches diversity and inclusion, sustainability, and community programmes

Ocean Holidays Group, the UK’s largest growth travel group*, has committed to making strides in balancing people, planet, and profit in 2022 and beyond, as it launches programmes dedicated to bolstering diversity and inclusion, sustainability and community work.

Harry Hastings, co-chief executive, said: “We start 2022 off having had a record-breaking year for new bookings in 2021 and bold ambitions for the future. Today, we are the largest growth travel group in the UK and our commitments are not only good for business but also ensure we continue to do the right thing by our staff, our customers, partners and wider society.

“We have spent the past six months going through every element of the business and have pulled together our business plan to ensure that future growth is underpinned by our people, our community and our planet.

“Last year we were awarded a ‘Good To Work For’ accreditation by the B Companies survey, and we want to ensure that we keep improving.”

Enhancing its commitment to its people, the group has recently started working with everymindatwork as its mental health wellbeing partner and has introduced a number of family-friendly policies for all staff, including pregnancy loss, parental bereavement leave and specific menopause support.

“Family-friendly policies help ensure employees can take leave, work from home and pursue other options, when necessary, in order to take care of family needs. Reducing team-members’ stress enhances job focus and allows us to retain employees who may otherwise resign to take care of family matters.

It also helps us maintain employee satisfaction because of the focus we place on family and work-life balance, as well as demonstrating the value we place on our team, of course,” commented Hastings.

Alongside this, are three separate programmes looking at diversity and inclusion, sustainability, and community.

Speciality consultancy Compelling Culture has been appointed as our external diversity and inclusion advisers, who will work alongside Karen Sheehan, head of people, as guardians of this stream of work.

Hastings added: “We have appointed external resource for this programme as we feel their expertise will ensure we build the foundations for learning, developing and importantly taking meaningful action that ensures long-term impact.”

Overseeing the community work is Matt Rains, programme manager, and Anna-Maria Janssen, head of product and commercial, is leading up the sustainability stream as its guardian.

Within all three programmes will be teams of up to six champions and team members from the group. They, along with the programme guardians, will kick off work in February and work with the wider company to deliver on integrating its environmental and social impact into day-to-day operations. The brief includes a three-year road map of measurable goals to be achieved by 2024.

“A recent staff survey highlighted that the team at Ocean Holidays Group is very supportive of being a part of this important work, with more than 80 per cent wanting to get personally involved. We realise that we are only just at the beginning of this project, but we are fully committed.

“Like many businesses who are seriously considering their impact we all have to start somewhere. We will be updating on our progress on all fronts throughout the months and years ahead,” said Hastings.

*Ocean Holidays Group is the largest growing UK travel group in 2021 – 2022 period compared to the last pre-pandemic year in 2019-2020 as per CAA rankings and the BDO diaries 2022.