Medium confidence
Aug 1, 2026
On The Beach
− 107 107 employees
Attribution · verbatim quote
“Chief executive Shaun Morton insisted the decision to make 107 employees redundant in August following a formal consultation process to “automate and streamline operational processes” was not a cost-cutting exercise.”
Summary
On The Beach made 107 employees redundant after automating and streamlining booking-fulfilment work. CEO Shaun Morton said the change carried a headcount cost but was intended to increase scale and service capacity rather than simply cut costs.
Evidence notes
- · Travel Weekly directly links the 107 redundancies to a formal process to automate and streamline booking fulfilment.
- · Morton said automated fulfilment had risen from roughly 55–60% of bookings to 99%, supporting productivity_consolidation rather than a generic AI-investment label.
- · The CEO disputed a pure cost-cutting interpretation; the event records operational consolidation, not direct person-for-model replacement.
- · The quote is Travel Weekly's wording around a quoted phrase, not Shaun Morton's own speech; no first-party source is cited, so confidence is medium.
- · Morton said the idea that AI reduced costs was "just not the case" and that the move was not a "cost out", but he did not deny that automating booking fulfilment drove the redundancies, so the event is not marked disputed.
- · The link is to automation of booking fulfilment rather than AI specifically.