Before the age of 20, Donat Rétif had never set foot in a plane: his world was confined to the quiet southern Belgian mining region he called home, and neighbouring France.

A year studying in Quebec as part of his business degree would prove the precursor to a globe­trotting career, culminating in landing the top job at loveholidays, the online travel agent responsible for millions of travellers taking to the skies each year. “I had a very simple upbringing. Canada was a big opening for me; I wanted to discover the world,” he says.

This weekend, the pressure ramps up as many schools in England and Wales break up for the holidays.

Rétif has led the business since late 2019, taking charge after meeting its founders, Jonny Marsh and Alex Francis, who had set up the company in 2012.

“We agreed on point A and point Z – where we were and wanted to be. My skills are to take businesses and grow them,” he says.

So far, the indicators are positive. The company has overtaken some rival online travel agents, including London-listed On the Beach, and is fighting it out for market share with package operators such as Tui and Jet2, which he says have a different model as they own physical assets, from hotels to planes. Rétif’s goal is to become the largest online travel specialist in Europe, using agile tech and new markets to expand.

This year, he forecasts passenger numbers will hit nearly 5 million across the UK and Ireland, up from 1 million in 2019. Revenues reached £235m in 2023, up by £100m on the previous year, while pre-tax profits rose from £30m to £55m, despite pressure on the balance sheet from rising interest rates and a hit from wildfires in Greece.

The fires devastated Rhodes – leaving the tourism ministry offering compensation for holidaymakers forced to flee the island – and cost the company nearly £1m to get customers home safely and cover cancellations resulting from hotel shutdowns. However, Rétif believes his business is well placed to react swiftly to extreme events. “We don’t have exclusivity [on hotels] – we’re not pushing people to go to one place because we make more money. They can easily change from one [destination] to another,” he says. “We do not own any assets. We don’t own hotels. We don’t own planes, which gives us this flexibility and agility to basically bounce back very quickly when there’s a crisis.”

He praises loveholidays’ web tools, which mean it can respond quickly to consumer concerns, whether over global heating or overtourism in places such as Dubrovnik and the Canary Islands. “When we realise that people care about an issue like this, we add filters. If there’s something our customers demand, we will offer it.”

Rétif’s tech-y take on the travel industry reflects the path of his career. After his studies, he started in telecoms, including a spell with global behemoth Verizon, taking on jobs in Europe and Canada and on America’s west coast. The Californian economy took a hit after 9/11, and then his father’s illness brought him back to Belgium, where he took a role digitising an international equivalent of the Yellow Pages. Three years managing a team of meteorologists as the boss of weather analysis business MeteoGroup followed, before his switch into the travel industry.

Rétif has had to navigate several other hurdles since taking charge, from the recent collapse of Germany’s FTI – Europe’s third-largest tour operator – which affected 31,000 of his customers, to the cost of living crisis and, crucially, Covid. The pandemic grounded flights and imposed lengthy restrictions on the travel industry, leaving Rétif scrambling to hang on to his workforce of young, sought-after tech engineers – and battling complaints over refunds, as airlines refused to pay out money owed to travel agents. “Countries were closing, triple-testing – there were a lot of uncertainties, especially in the UK,” he says.

Against this backdrop, he raised £94m across two funding rounds and hung on to loveholidays’ staff, tripling the workforce to more than 350. Last Christmas, he put previous pandemic-fuelled tensions with Ryanair aside – agreeing the budget carrier’s first partnership with an online travel agent. A recent expansion drive in Germany will be followed by an imminent launch in Austria, and possibly the Netherlands or Poland.

Loveholidays has been backed by the private equity firm Livingbridge since 2018, and last year it was reported that bankers were working on a sale that could value the business at £1bn. “I don’t know at this stage,” says Rétif. “The only thing you do as the CEO is control the mission, the vision and operations of your business.” Even if it does change hands, “nothing’s going to change”, he insists.

But taking charge of people’s holidays is a significant responsibility, and the public do not hold back if anything goes awry. How many one-star Trustpilot reviews has loveholidays received in the 48 hours before our interview, the Observer asks. “Five?” Rétif guesses. In fact, it’s 29. (For balance, it also had more than 100 five-star reviews, and has an overall rating of 4.3 out of 5.)

The complaints are fairly standard: airport transfers that didn’t show up, slow refunds, hotels shut after late flights – but a repeated issue is poor communication. Loveholidays “have a firewall of ill-informed, ill-prepared staff. It is impossible to reach anyone with any authority,” one irate reviewer wrote.

“When you send 5 million passengers abroad, you will always have some who are unhappy,” Rétif responds. “If you told me I had zero, I would have given you a kiss and asked: ‘How did you manage [not] to find it?’ I usually receive those very difficult ones [directly]; we always try to find a solution.” The firm has invested £13m a year in customer service, and 55% of requests are resolved by an AI chatbot, he says.

He believes the “certainty” given by elections either side of the English channel could provide a spending boost and “will be good for business”. He adds: “If you look at how [Britons] spend their money, the only category that has been going up for months is travel. It’s been raining for ever, and people are desperate to get outside and enjoy a little bit of vitamin D.”

CV

Age 53
Family A wife, Ludivine, and two children, Lucas, 22, and Pablo, 17.
Education Qualified ingénieur commercial (commercial engineer), studied at the University of Mons in Belgium, with one year at Laval University in Quebec City.
Pay Undisclosed.
Last holiday Santorini.
Biggest regret “Not becoming a professional football player [he played for the Belgian indoor national team], though I did manage to make the cut for our Loveholidays football team!”
Best advice he’s been given “Always surround yourself with better and younger people than you.”
Phrase he overuses “Don’t be more Catholic than the pope.” (A French expression, not a religious one.)
How he relaxes Playing sport and reading.