According to our findings Thomas Machala will manage Nocowanie.pl only until the end of September. The manager himself confirms that he is leaving the company.
– Nocowanie.pl is my fourth entrepreneurial project in this decade, after naTemat, WP and WP Pilot. In the venture capital industry this is called an “exit”. I am leaving Nocowanie.pl and Szallas Group because I did what I agreed with the supervisory board – he said in response to our questions. – I had to move from a family business to a modern management company and from an inquiry model to a booking model. We are approaching 140 cities with online bookings. We have increased the number of booking partners by 460% – he calculated.
Machała has not yet revealed details about his professional plans. – As a manager specializing in start-ups and transformations, I want to undertake another ambitious project, he noted.
– From October, the duties of Tomasz Machała – as interim country director – will be taken over by Mateusz Koślacz, a long-standing member of the Nocowanie management team – Michał Siegieda, director of the corporate communications office at Wirtualna Polska Holding, told us.
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On Wednesday, Tomasz Machała announced that Nocowanie.pl is completing the transition from the advertising model to the commission model (the latter operates platforms belonging to the Szallas Group). – Soon we will have 140 cities with instant booking (there was one in January). So it’s time for colors. Today we’re celebrating a new logo and Sparkusia (our friendly brand hero) – he wrote on LinkedIn.
She worked for eight years at Wirtualna Polska
Tomasz Machała started working at Wirtualna Polska Holding in November 2016 and in January 2017 he became editor-in-chief and vice president of publishing for the subsidiary Wirtualna Polska Media, which manages most of the holding’s websites with journalistic content.
He lost his position at the beginning of 2020, as a result of the work of an internal committee appointed by the company following articles by OKO.press, which revealed, among other things, during the meeting with journalists, during which Machała allegedly said: “I will not destroy business with the Ministry of Justice because your salary, your salary and the salaries of 25 other people depend on it”.
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Tomasz Machała remained at Wirtualna Polska Holding as head of the Pilot WP platform, a In early 2021, she became the president of the domestic tourism website Nocowanie.pl (in autumn 2021, Wirtualna Polska bought the last block of shares in the website, becoming its sole owner). At the end of 2022, Machała also began managing the Noclegi.pl platform, which joined Wirtualna Polska Holding as part of the acquisition of the Szallas Group for approximately PLN 83 million.
Before joining Wirtualna Polska Holding, Tomasz Machała managed the naTemat Group for 4.5 years (including as editor-in-chief of naTemat.pl and president of the company that publishes the portal) and as a journalist he worked for TVN24 and Polsat.
Departures from Wirtualna Poland
In recent weeks, several top managers have left Wirtualna Polska Holding. At the end of July, Wirtualna Polska Media CEO Joanna Pawlak left and was replaced by Jacek Świderski, president and one of the main shareholders of the entire holding. As part of the reorganization of the advertising office, the head of the sales department, Przemysław Mańkowski, left the company.
In May this year, as part of the group layoffs, the company dismissed 150 employees of Wirtualna Polska Media, or about 10 percent of the company’s staff. As we recently reported, the layoffs cost approximately PLN 9 million, although together with cost reductions in other areas, they are expected to provide annual savings of approximately PLN 20 million.
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In the second quarter of 2024, Wirtualna Polska Holding with an increase in revenues by 5.9%. to PLN 380.84 million, recorded a decrease in adjusted EBITDA by 1.8%. to PLN 98.41 million and net profit from PLN 33.59 to PLN 19.1 million.
The company is making another investment in the tourism sector. In the first half of June this year, it agreed to buy 80 percent of the shares of the owner of the Romanian tourism platform Litoralul Romanesc for 16.8 million euros. The transaction is expected to be completed by the end of September.
