Following the acquisition of his company, Tourico Holidays, by Hotelbeds, founder Uri Argov has retired from the organization. He will, however, remain a shareholder of the combined company. Argov founded the Orlando-based Tourico in 1994, overseeing its growth in the next 23 years to the point at which it was one of the largest bedbanks in the world, as well as one of the largest receptive tour operators in North America. With an inauspicious beginning as a fax spammer selling hotels that were not under contract—(and to which he admitted under a question posed at the RTO Summit in New York in 2008, “we did some things I’m not proud of in order to survive”) the company grew to over 50,000 hotels and over $1.5 billion in annual sales turnover. Argov, whose computer science background earned him a position in Israeli intelligence writing algorithms that predicted locations of suicide bombings, invested heavily in state of the art technology that was the envy of the industry. He also oversaw an aggressive team culture that ruffled a few feathers along the way while it produced surprisingly strong results.
