Premium holiday provider aims to expand into more countries

Neilson Active Holidays, a Brighton-based provider of overseas active holidays has been bought out for the second time, backed this time by mid-market private equity investment firm LDC.

The holiday provider offers activity-focused holidays across seven countries in Europe. It operates beachclubs, ski hotels and chalets as well as 65 yachts.

Neilson has capitalised on the increasing demand over the last few years for premium activity and “wellness” holidays.

The LDC investment will allow the business to open new hotels and extend the range of countries they operate in, as well as providing further backing for strategic acquisitions.

Neilson is led by chief executive David Taylor, formerly of TUI and Thomas Cook, and chairman Richard Bowden-Doyle, the former managing director of Thomson Holidays and Lastminute.com, and more recently non-executive director of Saga Travel Group.

Taylor and Bowden-Doyle joined Neilson in 2013, when Risk Capital Partners backed them in a buyout from Thomas Cook. Under their management Neilson has grown to become into an £80m-turnover business with further growth on the horizon.

As part of the deal, LDC’s Richard Whitwell and David Bains will join the board. The transaction provides an exit for Risk Capital Partners.

Taylor said: "LDC has a successful track record in the travel industry, but most importantly the investment team bought into our vision and growth strategy completely. This is critically important as we embark on the next phase of our journey.

Richard Whitwell, head of the East Midlands at LDC, added: "In line with the growing health and wellbeing trend, we are seeing an increasing number of people look to activity-focused holidays for relaxation and recuperation. As the leading player in the active holiday market for adult and families, Neilson is perfectly-placed for expansion."

A major increase in staff numbers, such as Neilson will encounter if their expansion plans go smoothly, can cause unforeseen problems for staff performing HR, admin and accounts job roles if the company’s method of recording time worked has not been updated. 

For example, it is very easy for staff to fill in paper timesheets incorrectly. Sometimes this can be deliberate time fraud, but sometimes it is just new staff getting confused, or people forgetting to fill in their timesheets until long after they’ve forgotten their exact shift details. 

Even if the details are all correct, most paper timesheets must then be manually transferred to a database (usually an Excel spreadsheet) before being sent to payroll software. 

There are many opportunities for human error to kick in during this time-consuming process – e.g. misreading employee’s handwriting (1 or 7?) or making a typo in entering the data.

At Time and Attendance Southern we offer specialised attendance management software which can work either with smartcards or with biometrics. As well as recording who has worked when, where and on which user-defined job, the WinTA.NET software suite can also export the data straight to all major payroll programmes (as well as many other features).

Our smartcards are about the size of a credit card and fit nicely into most wallets. The Radio Frequency technology means that you don’t need to physically swipe the cards, just hold them up near the reader terminal. This means they don’t wear down and need replaced.

For the ultimate deterrent against time theft, we can provide a hand scanner and/or a fingerprint reader. Smartcards can be lost, or swapped with colleagues to input fake times. This isn’t the case with hands and fingers!