FOR a man running one of the country’s biggest tour operators, Peter Long is a surprise package. Reticent, reserved, rarely answering questions with three sentences when one will suffice, he makes you wonder how he has made his mark in a business that cries out for the extrovert.

“Yeah, it can be a bit wearing,” he says gruffly. All those drinks with hoteliers, trips to exotic locations, receptions to host and exuberant young staff to manage. As chief executive of First Choice, the £2.2 billion-turnover tour operator that runs everything from mainstream beach holidays to specialist firms, high-street travel agents and the charter airline Air 2000, you would think a lot of it would be torture, especially as he says he detests waffle. Yet Long is now, in many people’s estimation, the best tour operator in Britain. Work that one out.

Earlier this month Long announced a surge in summer bookings at First Choice that seems, for now at least, to have calmed an anxious holiday industry. Rivals are up against it. MyTravel, the former Airtours, has plunged into the red; Tui, which runs Thomson Holidays among other brands, has issued a profit warning.

In fact, it has been a pretty rotten time for everyone in the industry since September 11. The threat of terrorism, the Sars outbreak, the second Gulf war — all have kicked holes in tour operators’ best-laid plans. Nobody knows what is going to happen next. Risk management and flexibility of capacity is all, and so far, Long appears to be playing the best game in town.

“All I want,” he says wearily, “is 12 months without major global upheaval.” Then he gives a lopsided smile. Sitting in shirtsleeves in the City offices of First Choice’s PR firm, he looks calmly cautious. Tall, trim, blue-eyed, with a thick thatch of springy black hair and a slightly hangdog demeanour, Long is one of those bosses happiest with those he knows. Bounce your first impressions of him off his colleagues — awkward, tough, introverted — and they say, no, no, you’ve got it all wrong, Peter is Peter, tight with his team, great leader, outgoing, motivational and trusting. He just doesn’t waste words.

Trained as an accountant, developed as a finance director by Sir Owen Green’s BTR, polished as a manager at Harry Goodman’s ILG, Long is now, at 51, a veteran of an industry where bosses tend to fizzle and pop with remarkable regularity. Look what happened to Goodman, whose holiday-to-airline business went down a flaming wreck in the early 1990s when ILG was overwhelmed by debt, and its founder dogged by rumours of private excesses. Long ran Goodman’s (profitable) tour-operator side, and describes the group’s collapse as the worst moment of his life.

“Holidaymakers stranded, partners owed money, thousands of people out of work.” He pauses as if revisiting a bad nightmare.

Did he think of quitting? No, he says. “You either deal with it by shrinking into your shell and feeling sorry for yourself, or you do something about it.”

Long says the self-pity lasted one night, then he woke up and thought, sod it, I can build something from this. So with a Spanish hotelier partner providing the cash, he set up his own tour operator, Sunworld, mopped up new business, and pushed on. Five years later he and his partner sold it all for £40m — most of which went back to Spain, even his chunk, with which he bought a villa in Majorca.

“Yeah, I didn’t make that much,” he says, “and that was the best thing to happen to me, because it meant I had to keep working.” And so he joined First Choice, which had only just changed its name from Owners Abroad.

That was seven years ago. Since then he has shifted the emphasis at First Choice from volume to margin — “I don’t want to be the biggest tour operator in Europe,” he says, “I want to be the most profitable” — and pushed its operations overseas so it sells not just to Brits but to the French, the Spanish, the Italians and the Germans. First Choice is still small compared with the German groups that now dominate the UK industry, running Thomas Cook and Thomson, but it does appear to be the fastest on its feet.

Long ascribes that to the flexibility the firm writes into deals with everyone from hoteliers to plane leasors, so First Choice can pick up and drop capacity as demand dictates. He has also bolstered the mainstream business by vacuuming up a clutch of specialists offering adventure, sailing and special locations holidays. His aim is to have mainstream making two-thirds of the holiday turnover and half the profit, and specialist the rest.

“What we decided back in 1999 was that just being a major outbound tour operator was not good for our shareholders because of the volatility.” It was then that he tried to merge First Choice with Kuoni, the Swiss-owned specialist, a move that was sidelined when a bid from rival Airtours (now MyTravel) plonked on his desk. That was eventually blocked by European regulators, but by then Kuoni had gone cold on the merger. Recent speculation linking others with Kuoni leaves Long nonplussed, as do rumours that First Choice might buy MyTravel. “I don’t foresee any more consolidation in the short term,” he says, shrugging. “The other major groups have all got big issues they have to deal with first.” Meaning? “Getting bigger is not where they are at right now. Getting in better shape is what’s important.”