Tsogo Sun Group CEO, Marcel von Aulock has confirmed the departure of both Graham Wood and Rob Collins from the company. Wood was MD of Southern Sun Hotels, while Collins was Chief Marketing Officer for Tsogo Sun.
Von Aulock will take responsibility for hotels directly and all staff who reported to Wood and Collins will now report directly to him. Several more positions were removed from head office but in other divisions such as finance and HR and not in roles as senior as Wood and Collins. The announcement was made to staff last week.
He says the decision was made in a move to flatten the group’s reporting structures and save costs. “The move follows the merging of Tsogo Sun’s hotel company and two gaming companies (Tsogo and Gold Reef City) which took place two years ago. When we merged these companies into one brand we also centralised a lot of functions. Since then, we’ve been pushing hotels and gaming into one cleaner operating structure and this was essentially the final part of this process. If we were to set up the Tsogo Sun brand from scratch, we would not have had these positions so we decided to eliminate them from the structure.”
Von Aulock says, contrary to some media reports, both Wood and Collins were very supportive of the move. “There has been a lot of speculation about conflict, but there was no antagonism at all.”
