Two new appointments have been announced at dnata Travel Group’s trade partnership team.

Raymond McErlaine will join as Trade Partnerships Manager for Scotland and Northern Ireland on 16 January, while Kym Coulbeck will become Head of Trade Support next week.

Raymond began his travel industry career in 1990 as the first Glasgow-based employee for Travel 2, before moving to Qatar Airways in 2006 to work in the field sales team.

He’s also worked for Virgin Atlantic and Newmarket Holidays.

He will report into Head of Trade Partnerships, Colin Currie, with a remit to support agent partners and homeworkers across the Scottish and Northern Ireland markets.

Kym replaces the recently promoted Karen Fletcher as Head of Trade Support and returns to the B2B team following a period working as Sales Development Manager for Gold Medal between 2007 and 2011.

She has since worked as Head of Sales at JTA, and as a Business Development Manager at both ITC The Travel Directors, and as Sales Director at Black Opal Travel Group.

She will be based at the dnata Travel Group B2B head office in Leyland, Lancashire, with responsibility for managing the agency sales team, supporting the field trade partnership team, managing the Farebank agent reward scheme, setting up and hosting agent fam trips and events, negotiating commercial agreements and brochure distribution.

The appointments come as dnata reports its Peaks campaigns are generating a 50% increase in the number of calls from agents compared to the same period in 2022.

The company says more calls are being handled each day, with the total volume on a par with levels not seen since before the pandemic.

Managing Director Simon Applebaum said: “All of our brands are enjoying an extremely promising start to the Peak sales period.

“The campaigns we have launched are our most extensive ever and its fantastic to see all the hard work that the team put in to pulling them together pay off.

“The investment we’ve made in recruiting and training up our contact centre team over the last 12 months is also making a big difference.

“We have a team of over 100 agents processing volumes of calls each day that we’ve not seen since before the pandemic, so wait times are also the lowest they’ve been for several years as well.”

Click here for details of agent incentives from dnata during Peaks.