Travolution Awards: Tui’s Mobility Hub leader picked out as Travolution Rising Star

The Rising Star Award went to a young woman who has quickly risen through the ranks to become product lead in Tui’s London-based Mobility Hub.

This year’s Travolution Rising Star Award went to a young woman who has quickly risen through the ranks to become product lead in Tui Group’s London-based Mobility Hub.

SiQing Lin, 32, not only manages a team of four others, which will be bolstered by two more in coming weeks, but also balances her time with running pearl jewellery ecommerce site Jacqueline Shaw on the side.

She established the business in 2008 having basically taught herself how to set up and run an online business.

The judges of the Rising Star Award were particularly impressed by Lin’s career progress to date, the impact she has had in her field and the vision she has for her company and the travel sector.

Having started as a user experience architect, Lin was soon made product lead – a role she has held for three and a half years.

Lin has overseen Tui’s move away from the Titanium framework for the creation of apps, championing building individual modules, like Lego bricks, rather than pages.

She believes in creating a flexible mobile experience that can be easily adapted to customer needs allowing the user to switch in different types of ‘modules’ relevant to where the customer is on their journey.

Where Tui’s app had previously specialised in the pre-holiday experience, it is increasingly putting strong focus on the experience in-resort and post-holiday.

To inform her work, Lin undertook a large scale competitive analysis of other travel apps and those of largescale retail brands such as Nike.

Her boss Deepak Jha, head of the Mobility Hub, nominated her for the Rising Star Award. Lin said: “I wasn’t expecting to win at all, what a fantastic thing to have on my CV. I think the judges liked the fact that I run my online business on the side.

“I love my job, I just want to stay and develop wonderful things. If anything else came along that would be a natural progression eventually but I love it here.

“I want to say thank you to Gail Kenny Recruitment and Travolution but especially to Tui.

“They really do support the growth of individuals. The managers don’t try and keep people within their team or anything like that; it’s all about what’s best for each person.

“I try to be the manager I wanted when I was starting out. I have paid attention to what I loved and hated.”