After his impressive career was unexpectedly extended by 3.5 years due to corona, Steven van der Heijden will step down permanently as CEO at Corendon in January. Gunay Uslu, former Secretary of State for Culture and Media and the sister of founder Atilay, will take over. Van der Heijden calls her ‘his dream candidate’ and will coach the new management from the shadows, as a non-statutory board member. In the last TravMagazine of 2023, he looks back one more time. Actually, 2019 would be the last full year in which Steven van der Heijden was CEO. In the spring of 2019, an agreement was signed with the Scandinavian-German venture investor Triton. A year later, he would take over a majority of the shares in Corendon. Triton then wanted to merge Corendon with Sunweb, in which it had already taken a majority stake at the end of 2018. Mattijs ten Brink, former CEO of Sunweb, would lead Sunweb and Corendon as CEO. It turned out differently. Due to the corona crisis, Triton/Sunweb wanted to cancel the deal and came up with legal arguments to cancel the sale. Corendon went to court, but the Court of Appeal in Amsterdam ruled that Sunweb could not be obliged to buy Corendon. In the meantime, Van der Heijden had already decided that the corona crisis was not a good time to take early retirement. He wanted to drag Corendon through the crisis and stayed on board. With the corona crisis behind him, the time has now come for Van der Heijden to close the CEO door behind him. Corendon is the latest travel company in a long line where Van der Heijden has been in charge. Your parents are both university educated. Why did you have to go into tourism? ‘After grammar school, I first studied history. My father is not only a Dutch scholar but also a historian and my grandfather was a professor of history. So that was very much on my path. But shortly after I started studying in the late 1970s, the Netherlands ended up in just about the deepest economic crisis in recent history, with high unemployment. I saw that many of the people who graduated in history couldn’t find a job at all. I didn’t feel like it. I quit and had to go into service, you still had that back then. During my military service, my mother pointed out to me that there was a HBO tourism course in Breda, the then NWIT, later NHTV and now BUAS. That’s when I did that training.’ With his well-known self-mockery, Van der Heijden adds: ‘And since then my living was bought, because I soon realised that at the time you didn’t have to be very smart to make it far in tourism.’ In the mid-1980s, prosperity increased rapidly again and with it the need for travel. Mass tourism was introduced. It was the time when customers were queuing up for the travel agency and tour operators could barely keep up with the rapidly rising demand. 
Photo: Steven van der Heijden with Corendon founder Atilay Uslu.
Have you ever regretted your choice of tourism? Van der Heijden: ‘Yes, very much so. I would have loved to have been in front of the classroom as a history teacher for 35 years.’ And laughing: ‘No, of course not… I once taught part-time for two years and later full-time at a study programme in Doetinchem. I noticed in the second year that I was making the same jokes as the year before. And then I thought: can I keep it up? But I’ve always found teaching and explaining very important. I like to understand things and make sure that others understand it too. So you have to know the ins and outs, immerse yourself in files. And you also have to be able to explain it. You can’t explain things you don’t understand yourself. I’ve always been pretty fanatical about that. I got that from my academic studies and that also gave me a lot of advantages in the business world.’ What is the biggest change in 38 years of travel? ‘Economies of scale and the internet. For me, internet is not so much the fact that you can book online, but that the customer is in charge. That’s what I find fascinating about the internet revolution. The fact that the customer is in charge forces companies, especially in hospitality, to perform better. Companies had to adapt and really start listening to the customer. And not every entrepreneur was able to do that.’ In his 38-year career, Van der Heijden has worked for almost every major travel company. ‘And a number of them subsequently went bankrupt,’ he notes with a laugh. ‘Eurojet was the first one I joined as a product manager on 1 January 1988. I quickly became a manager and later a director. I was given that director’s title shortly before Henk Jansen sold the company to Holland International. Just before the sale, he thought I should have a bigger car and a director’s title. This would lead to a better entrance at Holland International, which he invariably referred to as the ‘ministry of tourism’. That was a good lesson. That director’s title gave me a special position, because Holland International had only one director and that was Ab Houtzaager. I was allowed to keep that director’s title abroad. In the Netherlands, I was product group manager.’ After five years at Holland International, Joop ter Haar knocked on the door and asked if Van der Heijden wanted to switch to Oad. The condition was that it would move to Holten. As a compromise, Velp was eventually chosen near Arnhem. An important achievement at Oad was the development of distant destinations, which Van der Heijden set up together with Gerrit Slot as director of Tour Operating. Puerto Vallarta in Mexico as a full charter with Martinair is a well-known one, but also charters in Bali and Kathmandu (Nepal). After four years, you left Oad again. Why is that? ‘At a certain point, you notice that at a family business like Oad, the real decisions were made at the coffee table on Sunday morning. So that you never belong 100 percent. As long as everything is hosanna and everyone feels the same way, it’s fine. But as soon as there is some discussion, it’s different. And besides, of course, Julius had to be launched as Joop’s successor. And yes, I thought that was rather early. This was later explained as if I did not want to share my position, but that was not the case. It led me to look around. And then you are approached again at exactly the right time, whether I was interested in talking to Neckermann. Frank Allard, sales director at Martinair at the time and later chairman of the Barin, played a mediating role in this. At the request of Wim De Smet, the then boss of Neckermann Belgium and the Netherlands, he asked me if I was interested.’ 
Things were not going so well for Neckermann Netherlands at the time. Why did you take the bait? ‘After the conversation with Wim De Smet, we came to an agreement fairly quickly. Things were indeed going badly for Neckermann Netherlands. I always think that’s a good starting position, when a company is not doing well, but you see plenty of potential. That you enter a company at a time when things can only get better.’ You also did the merger with Vrij Uit. Did that go smoothly? ‘I thought that was an interesting period in my career. It confronted me for the first time with the incredible importance of culture in an organization. The culture at Neckermann was commercial and no-nonsense. Don’t talk about it, but clean it. While Vrij Uit came out from under the wings of the chic ANWB, with Annick van de Geest at the helm. Vrij Uit was much more focused on appearance and quality and they did that incredibly well. But that made it a marriage far from self-evident. When Annick announced her retirement, there was really only one logical candidate to lead the merged company, and that was me.’ How did you get Neckermann up and running? By doing more online? ‘I remember a huge discussion with travel agents of the time; with a number of prominent Toerkoop members leading the way. During Neckermann’s brochure presentation trips, we always had a discussion session with travel agents. In those years, it was mainly about online sales. That was the period when travel agents were like: if the big tour operators jointly decide not to sell via the internet, then there is no problem, is there?’ Van der Heijden continues: ‘But indeed, how did I get Neckermann up and running? I put a lot of effort into getting Gerrit involved. Initially, he did not want to move to the west, because he was rooted in Twente and Neckermann was in Diemen. But in the end, it worked. We started working with even more attention and professionalism when it came to destinations, to pricing. Neckermann was a fantastic organization in terms of purchasing power and had many interesting beds. It was a machine that had to be set up well for the Dutch market and then it would run. There was no more efficient club than Neckermann at the time. And, of course, we benefited from the fact that the merger between Arke and Holland International failed miserably. That company was very busy with itself at the time, so you leave a lot on the table. TUI was also more expensive. We at Neckermann benefited enormously from this. So there was a market, we were more efficient and we were cheaper.’ Nevertheless, Van der Heijden would also leave Thomas Cook/Neckermann. “That was after Stefan Pichler came to the helm there, someone who believed in control. There came a period when things were not going so well financially and we even needed the signature of the head office in Oberursel to buy toilet paper. Then I was like: you pay me a CEO salary and then I have to get a signature from you for the purchase of toilet rolls. Eventually, I no longer felt at home in that culture. And then another phone call came at the right time. From TUI’. Read the complete interview with Steven van der Heijden in the recently published TravMagazine 51, the last edition of 2023. ‘It’s not about you as CEO, it’s about the people who do the real work’
