A View from the Top: Dana Dunne, chief executive of eDreams, on how online travel is changing

The eDreams mobile app was rated 2.5 out of 5 on the App Store in 2014 – today it is the number one-rated app on the market. Hazel Sheffield talks to the chief executive behind the turnaround

Dana Dunne, 54, joined eDreams from easyJet in 2014 and is changing consumers’ habit of conducting searches on phones while paying online

When Dana Dunne took over as the chief executive of online travel agent eDreams in 2015, the company was coming out of a “post-IPO nightmare”.

Shares had crashed 60 per cent to €3.14 (£2.77) within months of eDreams floating in April 2014, making it one of the worst performing stocks of that year. The crash wiped out over €1bn of its market value.

“The company did need to change and improve in many dimensions,” says Dunne, reflecting on the early days of his tenure days before he marks three years as chief executive. The share price has improved gradually to €4.87 a share, some way off previous highs of €10.25, but he says the company is on surer footing.

Dunne staged a turnaround that focused on using the sheer size of eDreams, which operates in 43 countries. You may only have heard of eDreams when redirected there on the internet, but the company is the biggest retailer of flights in Europe. Some 37 per cent of those bookings come from mobile, ahead of the industry average of 25 per cent. That puts eDreams ahead of the competition as people become more comfortable making large transactions on their phones.

“Lots of people search on mobile and then book online,” says Dunne, on the phone from Barcelona where eDreams has been based since 2000, after being founded in Silicon Valley. “We have shown that you can get people to book on mobile.”

The eDreams mobile app was rated 2.5 out of a possible five on the app store in 2014. “It wasn’t great,” he says. Dunne used the company’s scale to dedicate more resources to mobile. He created around 50 different teams working on products, divided into features and functionalities. One of these teams worked on a special feature for the app, such as the alert that users receive when they arrive at a destination to tell them where their baggage is, while another worked on sending reports and statistics about users back to hoteliers.

While eDreams makes its money from bookings, it also has a role to play helping hoteliers improve their online presence to attract customers. eDreams has 30 per cent of the European flight market. “We’re so much larger than anyone in Europe,” says Dunne. “We can say, ‘These are the types of people who are looking at your site. We have 18 million customers but these are the types you get, the ones from Leeds or Singapore are the most interested in you’.”

The company has developed intelligence to create socio-demographic profiles of customers to sell hotel rooms: “We can say for a couple with children looking at a holiday 30 days prior to departure, they are most likely to travel to this destination and stay in this type of hotel room and we can compare that to the market.”

Today, eDreams has the number-one rated mobile app in the industry, says Dunne.

In the next three years, it plans to develop algorithms to decide what products to show customers. “The machine updates itself using test results,” says Dunne. On mobile, the eDreams app can show a maximum of two or three hotel rooms per screen. The machine would work out which hotels it should show based on customer data including gender, age, and how soon the customer wants to travel.

I ask Dunne if the machine could also learn about budgets and adjust the price of hotels and flights based on what it knows the customer can afford. He says that while that kind of activity is happening in the industry, eDreams doesn’t engage in it.

“If you go to some airline websites and come back 15 minutes later the price is higher because they know you are interested,” Dunne says. “They collect cookies. It’s not just airlines. It’s a general e-commerce practice that cuts across practices. We don’t engage in that, we’re focused on making sure the consumer is doing well. It has to be a win-win.”

Dunne joined eDreams from easyJet, where he worked on improving the experiences of customers. When he started at easyJet it was still considered a budget airline. Dunne told easyJet to stop referring to itself as “low-cost” and start referring to “high-value”. “They did a good job at making it a mainstream airline,” he says of the company under Caroline McCall, who has since left to become chief executive of ITV.

Dunne gets his love of travel from an international upbringing. He was born in Manhattan and speaks with an American accent but is also a British national. “I spent half my life living in the UK, a good portion in Barcelona, Paris and Brussels and Madrid,” he says. “When I was growing up my parents told me there were many ways of doing things. From a business point of view I knew the world wasn’t going to get less global.”

At 54, he is a keen cyclist and gets out to the Pyrenees for long distance rides whenever he has time. I say he must be very fit. “I am very small and thin!” he says. “It’s outdoors, you get fresh air, it’s also part of my youth.”

But his favourite way to spend time outside of work is with his family. His son and daughter both live in the UK. “They love Barcelona, they come down with many friends and take over,” he says. “There are times when I think I have to get out the house and find a hotel!”

Dunne, of all people, knows there’s an app for that.