Assessment

Two large Travel Agencies are about to merge together. Holiday Seekers Travel Agency and Small WorldTravel Agency are both public companies (shares listed on the stock exchange).

TheHoliday Seekers Travel Agencywas established in 1960 and it is a traditional agency with 50 physical branches in the Middle East and 301 employees. Bookings for hotels, air tickets, tours, etc. are all done ‘physically' by welcoming the customer inthe travel agency branch and dealing with his / her holiday needs.

The Small World Travel Agency was established in 2001 and it is an online ‘virtual' high tech travel agency with no physical location or branches. Their headquarter is based in Downtown Dubai .... 65 employees work for this travel agency.

The CEO's of both companies are extremely anxious (they know at least one of them has to go).

The news of the merger is not public yet. Only members of the Board of Directors know about the merger. No one else knows. It is a fact, however, that restructuring is essential and ‘rightsizing' is inevitable.

It has been decided that the new company (the result of the merger) will still have physical branches (20 branches), which is much less than the number of branches the Holiday Seekers Travel Agency currently has, giving customers the choice to use a traditional way to book their holidays or to do it fully online.

Here is what you are supposed to do:

You have been approached by a regulatory body (acting in the interest of all shareholders) to be a Consultant to offer advice on how to handle this ‘Change'. You will be paid 200,000 AED for your report. You are, therefore, required to write areport of Maximum 15 pages offering your advice on how theyshould implement the change.

There are many issues that you must address for example:
- What are the possible impacts of the change on ALL stakeholders and how to deal with these impacts?
- Who should lead the change? Type of leadership style required, Propose a team to lead.
- Prepare the culture to accept the change.
- Propose a change model that they can follow.
- Explain how each phase of the model may be achieved.
- How do you propose to maintain the change? Sustainability issues.
- You are gonna love this - Name the new company.
- In other words, you are required to demonstrate that you can apply what you learnt in this course. The more issues you tackle the more you demonstrate to me that you actually learnt from each lesson.

Rules:
1- Your report must not exceed 15 pages including cover page, references, appendices etc.
2- Use Times New Roman font size 12 @ 1.5 line spacing.
3- The report should look professional. No unnecessary photos or decoration for example.
4- The more references you use the richer your report will be and will reflect on the grade. Of course you must use the Harvard style for referencing.
5- Be as innovative as possible, but remain realistic.
6- I welcome your opinions, suggestions and recommendations but you MUST back them by references in order to strengthen your arguments. For example, if you suggest a way to deal with resistance then back this by a published research paper(s).
7- You are NOT supposed to base all the report on a single case study. In other words, do not try to find a case study about two organizations merging together then base all your report on such case study.
8- Learn from your mistakes of the first assignment.
9- You may use ‘I' because you are writing a report as an expert (consultant). You are NOT going to have any role in the change management. You are simply offering an initial advice.