BCD President and CEO, John Snyder, is stepping down on July 1 after 30 years with the TMC.
He will hand over to Stephan Baars, BORON CEO and former BCD Chief Financial Officer.
A native of Hanover, Germany, Baars has 30 years of executive leadership experience in the telecommunications, oil and gas production, business travel and investment sectors.
In 2013, he became chairman of the Supervisory Board for BCD Travel Germany, a role he still holds today.
In 2017, Baars left BCD Travel to become CEO of BORON, the private investment company of BCD founder John Fentener van Vlissingen.
Snyder said: “After three decades of doing what I love, there was never going to be an easy time to say goodbye and step away, but this is the right time.
“It was important to me to help get BCD well on the road to recovery, with the pandemic in our rearview mirror. As a testament to what a fundamentally strong company and culture we have here, we’ve maintained an extraordinary track record of client retention and sales success.
“We’ve rebuilt our teams with an eye on delivering the world’s very best travel solutions and customer service. And we have a clear path for our next phase of growth. I can say with full confidence that BCD’s best days are yet to come.”
Snyder turns the reins of BCD over to his “longtime friend and colleague”, saying it was a transition that “speaks to the BCD culture”.
“So robust is our culture that it lets us refer affectionately to ‘boomerang’ colleagues — people who leave for other opportunities but return to the BCD Travel family, drawn back by the strength of our values and our commitment to living them,” Snyder said.
“Stephan has almost 14 years of travel industry experience, and I had the pleasure and privilege of working closely with him during his 11-year tenure as BCD Travel’s CFO.
“Stephan shares my conviction that client focus lies at the heart of a successful enterprise. He also believes in the importance of people and innovation, and in long-standing relationships with business partners. His track record in steering companies through times of change and growth speaks to his skill in aligning commercial, operational, technology and central service teams toward common goals.”
Baars added: “In his more than three decades with BCD Travel, John has accomplished an amazing body of work that has benefited not only our company but the entire travel industry.
“I’m honoured to follow in his footsteps and build on that incredible success. Like John, I’m a ‘people person,’ and I believe that perhaps his greatest legacy is promoting and nurturing a strong company culture, guided by core values that feed long-term success.”
“As founder, I am grateful to John for his role in building BCD to what it is today. And I am confident that Stephan is the right person to guide our family company into the next, next generation,“ van Vlissingen said.
