P&O Cruises and Cunard Line have announced the appointment of three new directors to join their commercial team, the two Southampton based Carnival Corp & plc companies said in a joint statement.

Jeremy Tait, currently director of proposition development and insight for Direct Line will join as insight director on 1 July, covering both P&O Cruises and Cunard. 

Chris Edgington, previously commercial director of Coral for the Gala Coral Group, joins P&O Cruises as marketing director whilst Angus Struthers, currently senior director global communications for TripAdvisor Inc, takes on the same role for Cunard.  Both will join the business from the end of August. 

Carnival UK chief commercial officer Gerard Tempest said: 

“These three key senior appointments will help us to evolve and strengthen our brands and customer experiences still further. Their proven blue chip backgrounds within marketing and communications will bring new focus, creativity and insight to our leadership team. 

“Cunard Line and P&O Cruises are brands which have shaped British cruising over the last 175 years and are amongst the most famous cruise brands in the world. We have a unique heritage to preserve, while at the same time we need to ensure we are instrumental in developing the future of British cruising. We want strongly appealing and highly differentiated brands, without compromising their core values.” 

At Direct Line Jeremy Tait proactively delivered compelling, challenging and commercial 
consumer, market and competitor insight to drive business decisions, putting the 
customer at the heart of the business.  His recent achievements include the creation of branded proposition strategies and delivering two new propositions: the Green Flag “one-hour promise” and the multi-product Direct Line “together” proposition that starts to reward customers for engaging with the brand. 

Prior to his role with Direct Line, Jeremy was head of proposition development of RBS Retail Bank for three years, and before that he was strategy director for Tesco Personal Finance. 

As part of the Gala Coral Group executive team, Chris Edginton had responsibility for 1,750 betting shops, a significant online business and 12,000 employees.  Chris was responsible for a £15m budget for marketing, sponsorship, broadcast, PR, insight and internal communications.  Prior to this role Chris led large teams at a number of businesses including McDonalds, Disney, Ladbrokes and William Hill. 

At Trip Advisor inc Angus Struthers built an international team across Europe and Asia and developed an overarching global PR strategy implemented with local market variations.  Prior to Trip Advisor Inc Angus spent eleven and a half years with Virgin Atlantic developing the Virgin Upper Class service and was instrumental in driving a service-driven culture change.