Peter Long, who will head the enlarged TUI Travel, lives and breathes the travel industry. After qualifying as an accountant, he started out in the more prosaic world of construction, but he has spent the past 23 years becoming one of the industry’s top tour operators.

In 1984, he quit BTR, the engineering group, to join Harry Goodman’s International Leisure Group (ILG). He went on to run its Intasun business, until ILG’s airline collapsed in the wake of the Gulf War, causing the rest of the group to follow suit like dominos.

Mr Long emerged from the wreckage to found Sunworld Holidays with a Spanish partner. They went on to sell to Thomas Cook in 1996 for a rumoured £40 million. That year he joined First Choice Holidays, which had almost been wiped out by a price war, as part of a turnaround team. Mr Long reshaped First Choice, reducing its dependence on low-margin packages and refocusing it on long-haul trips and niche areas, such as adventure holidays.

The natural progression was to have culminated in the sale of the group’s mainstream business, but this failed at the eleventh hour last month when the two remaining bidders, Thomas Cook and MyTravel, announced plans to merge. That setback was turned into a positive yesterday when First Choice announced a £4.5 billion merger with TUI, of Germany.

Mr Long, 54, is married with three children and has homes in Tunbridge Wells and Majorca. His hobbies include boating, skiing, walking and following Chelsea football club and the England rugby union team.

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