Ben Mather Email & Phone Number

Peterborough, United Kingdom

As the Costing / Pricing Manager for Scheduled and Dynamic reporting into the Head of Yield Support, my responsibilities included:Managing a team of between six and ten direct reports, including the setting of development plans and yearly objectives and recruiting and training candidates for employment.Roles that reported to me were Costing/Pricing Executives, Margin Analysts and Aviation Executives.Creation and maintenance of margin profiles across multiple systems to manage the pricing of Thomas Cook’s dynamically priced platforms and brands (TC Scheduled, Flexibletrips, Airtours, Cresta/City Escapes), working with both internally contracted inventory and XML based content.IT project work alongside senior stakeholders from across the business, working as both an SME for pricing logic and the business lead.Auditing daily booking files and investigating cases of margin variance and cost discrepancy.Single point of contact for all DP pricing queries and support.Experience with pricing up travel brochures and special offer campaigns.Cost and margin analysis, interpretation of contract data and forward pricing based on historic trends.Calculating and reporting financial data to department heads and other stakeholders.Develop, grow and maintain talent by embracing a high performance culture, providing regular feedback and coaching alongside personalised SMART objectives.Created bespoke Excel based pricing and analysis tools to speed up manual data processes and give the business wider visibility of potential issues.

Reporting into the Costing Manager my responsibilities included: Responsible for both longhaul charter costing as well as Scheduled businesses for longhaul and city breaks. Responsible for the daily updates to the pricing contracts to allow the lates and brochure pricing to be accurate and offer up to date pricing and offers. Review special offers being agreed between purchasers and hoteliers and challenge potential issues Creation of the upgrade supplements and assessment of the mark up being applied Creation, review and sign off of full season package pricing Creation, review and sign off of the brochure pricing panels Creation of advanced loading documents for the Data Control departmentAchievements• Whilst in this role I was selected to work as the sole business contact on a project to move scheduled businesses away from a legacy manual pricing and loading process and on to the main Tour Ops BPS (Brochure Pricing System). I created the requirements and designed the processes needed to fully realise this project and worked for 11 months end to end from spec to implementation in addition to my core role. Created training documentation and system manual and rolled out change to wider Costing team.• PROUD – Pioneering Our Future award in 2009 for work on the BPS project.• Internally promoted to Senior Costing Executive and then to Pricing Manager for Scheduled Business due to a proven track record of high performance and leadership potential.