Your Stories: Former Cruise1st MD on setting up a homeworking agency

Q. You’ve set up your agency under Advantage Travel Partnership’s Managed Services model – how has trading been so far?
I started on March 6 and I hit higher than what I forecast for month one. I’m trying to start off organically, so I’m not paying for any marketing or anything like that. I’m going to networking events and talking to friends, family and contacts. I’m just trying to spread the word until I become profitable and then I’ll start investing money into pay-per-click campaigns and other marketing ideas.

Q. Have you made any notable bookings?
I booked a week’s trip to a five-star hotel in Dubai, the Jumeirah Marsa Al Arab, with business-class flights for £22,000. I was quite happy they were willing to pay that for a week’s holiday. But I’m positioning myself as being able to sell anything. I started out at Althams Travel and sold everything while I was there. I don’t want to turn anyone away. No matter what someone wants, I’ll make sure I can look after them.

Q. How big would you like the business to grow?
I’ve got to remember why I set this up – I set it up as a lifestyle choice, so I’ve got to be very careful that I don’t push too hard to grow it. However, I am very keen on the idea of helping self-employed agents who want to set up their own business but don’t necessarily have the knowledge of how to do it or don’t have the capital to be able to do it. So I could recruit them and they could work under my licence to be able to fulfil their dreams.

Q. You started in the travel industry more than 30 years ago. How did you get into it?
My passions at school were languages. I was studying French and German and the careers teacher said, ‘Oh, you might like travel’. So I ended up going for a mock interview at the local Althams Travel branch in Nelson near Burnley and I got a glowing report back from the manager. I went back to school and didn’t think anything of it, but about four months later I got a letter from the manager of the Althams branch saying how impressed they were and they thought I’d really fit in. They were offering the NVQ in travel and tourism, so I became a travel agent and I was there for seven years.

Q. What was your career path in the cruise sector?
I started with the cruise section of MyTravel, The Cruise Store, as a cruise sales agent and did that for about 12 months. I was the top sales agent from month three. I progressed to become a team leader and then I became call centre manager. Then Thomas Cook came along and merged with MyTravel. I took up the position of homeworking manager at a time when homeworking wasn’t really a big thing. I ended up taking redundancy and then I got approached by Cruise1st because they knew I was available. I became their call centre manager and worked my way up, looking after the UK, Australia and Singapore from a call centre perspective. Then we created a team in Manila, so I helped set that up. And then I became managing director, just before Covid hit.

Q. What was it like being a managing director during the pandemic?
It definitely wasn’t a normal managing director term. Every day I was just doing anything I could to keep the business afloat. Pre-Covid, we had 110 staff but at the worst point of the pandemic we had 12. So I was having to make redundancies and put people on furlough for long periods of time. We had a retail store, which I had to close. I was managing cashflow more than anything.

Q. Why did you decide to leave the role?
I left in December 2021 because Covid put a lot of stuff into perspective for me. Time became the number-one priority. I thought I would take a step back and spend more time with my daughter. I’m envisaging maybe a couple more years where she’ll be comfortable hanging out with Dad and then it might become, ‘Dad’s a bit boring now and it’s not cool’.

Can you tell us why you left Althams to go travelling? 

I got to the stage where I was sending all these people away on holidays and I loved to travel, so I thought, ‘Life’s too short. I’m going to go and do the whole backpacking thing’. 

I booked it for a year and ended up going for three. We went to Hong Kong, did a month in Thailand, then went across to Australia and drove all the way around Australia – about 18,000 miles. 

I worked in various jobs throughout that period, then got back to Sydney and had my first experience in call centres. I worked for a company called Aussie Mortgage Market in the centre of Sydney, setting up appointments for mortgages. That gave me a really good insight into call centres, which ultimately led me to look at the call centre environment in cruise when I came back to the UK in 2004. After Australia, I flew over to New Zealand and drove all the way around it. I eventually got to Queenstown and spent a winter season there. I got a job at the local petrol station and would ski every day. Then I went back to Australia, before spending the rest of the time in southeast Asia.