Kirsteen Vickerstaff is General Counsel and Company Secretary of On the Beach Group plc and a member of the Executive team, advising the Board of one of the UK’s leading listed, tech-enabled travel businesses. Over almost 11 years with the Group, she has built the legal and governance function and helped steer the business through significant corporate, regulatory and operational change.

Starting with no in-house team, Kirsteen has built a 12-strong function covering legal, regulatory, litigation, data protection, risk management, customer health and safety, governance, company secretarial and public affairs. Her focus has been on putting in place clear, proportionate frameworks that support good decision-making without slowing the business down.

Kirsteen trained at Hammonds, now Squire Patton Boggs, qualifying as a corporate finance lawyer. She has worked across private, private equity-backed and listed businesses, with earlier senior in-house roles at Phones 4u and Lifestyle Services Group, now part of Assurant. That experience shaped a practical approach to legal risk, compliance and governance.

At On the Beach, Kirsteen has played a leading role in many of the Group’s key milestones, including its IPO, acquisitions, equity raises, share buyback programmes, and board and senior leadership changes. She also led the company’s legal and regulatory response to major industry events, including the failures of Monarch and Thomas Cook and the COVID-19 pandemic.

Her work has also extended beyond the business. Kirsteen served for ten years on ATIPAC, advising government on airline insolvency and ATOL policy. She is also a co-founder of Online Travel UK, the industry body representing the UK’s leading online travel businesses, and has been closely involved in engagement with government and regulators on competition, consumer rights and travel policy.

A key achievement was her role in litigation involving Ryanair under the Package Travel Regulations, in which she led the strategy that resulted in a High Court judgment clarifying Regulation 29 and establishing an important precedent on refunds. Alongside the litigation, she engaged with ministers and officials on the wider operation of the regime, and that work has helped inform proposed legislative reform to strengthen organisers’ refund rights as part of the current PTR reform programme. The wider issue also evolved into a constructive commercial relationship, underscoring her ability to handle complex disputes in a way that supports longer-term business outcomes.