Your Stories: L&J World Travel founders look back at 30 years in travel

Q. What sort of holidays do you sell?
Michaela: Most of our sales are bucket and spade trips, although we tend to get more of the higher-value ones – not the online £299 prices. We do a lot of four-star family stuff. Long-haul hasn’t really been great since Covid, but the US has been huge. And we do a lot of honeymoons – Vegas, Mexico, Dubai, the Maldives – which is all down to word of mouth.

 

Q. How has this year been so far?
Michaela: Peaks was more or less flat for us. We did see there was going to be a late market, because families were getting priced out. So peaks wasn’t where we wanted it to be, but it wasn’t a disaster – and lates definitely picked up for us. There were a lot of people travelling within a week of their booking.

Q. What’s the standout booking you’ve secured in the past decade?
Denise: Probably my wedding. I got married in Mexico and 34 people went to the Hard Rock Hotel Riviera Maya on an all-inclusive basis for 11 nights. But we’ve booked lots of big family groups. 

Q. Can you explain your agency’s name?
Denise: We played about with names for quite some time, and then it just came to us – I’m Logue, Michaela is Johnston, and Michaela’s two kids are Luke and Jude and mine are Lauren and Jake, so we went with L&J.

Q. How did you both get into travel?
Michaela: In the 90s in Derry amid the Troubles we weren’t fortunate enough to have any large companies investing in Northern Ireland. I was at school and heard that Thomas Cook was opening a travel agency in Derry and looking for trainees. I thought about how exciting that would be. I applied for a place on the youth training programme and was lucky enough to be accepted and joined in 1994. Denise joined the same scheme a year later, so it was the start of the ‘Terrible Twosome’.

Q. How did L&J World Travel begin?
Denise: I was at Thomas Cook from 1995 and left in 2013. I was managing two of the stores and then the cluster manager job was announced. I was pregnant at the time, so I decided to take redundancy and leave the business.

 

I started as a homeworker with Brilliant Travel in December 2013 and constantly told Michaela to leave her job and come and do this with me. In April 2015, she decided to join too. Then I moved from being a homeworker to becoming a Brilliant Travel managed service travel partner as L&J World Travel in June 2015.

Q. What was it like running the business in the early days?
Denise: I’d already had a year working at home, so we had that bank of customers. And when we started to put ourselves on social media, people saw who it was and knew us from Thomas Cook, so they came to us. We started in my kitchen with two reconditioned laptops and became very busy, very quickly.

Q. What’s the set-up now?

Denise: We have a team of eight – five of our staff are based in the office in Derry and we have three self‑employed homeworkers. We have been trading for 10 years as L&J World Travel without a shop and have grown and grown, so this model works for us. 

Q. How does it feel to have marked 10 years in the travel business?
Michaela: I feel really proud that we’ve done it, considering everything we’ve been through. To survive the mental torture of Covid with zero help from public funds is definitely worthy of a pat on the back. 

Denise: When you think back to when we were earning £50 a week at Thomas Cook in the 90s and then you see us now, 30 years later, with a successful business that continues to grow, we’re very proud.

 

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What was it like growing up in Derry during the Troubles?

Denise: Our families tried to keep us sheltered from what was going on, but you could see it. You went down the street to go to the shop and the Army was there hiding behind bushes. You saw houses in your street getting raided by the Army. But although we could see everything, we probably grew up a wee bit green about it all because it wasn’t something that was discussed in our families – we were never political or anything like that, and I think that’s why we had such a great relationship, in that we were very open to everybody.

 

When we were in our late teens, it didn’t matter what you were – Protestant or Catholic – as long as you were having fun, and we were having great craic. That was the only thing that mattered to us. We had a very mixed group of friends. The school we went to was actually the school that Derry Girls was based on – it was a grammar school run by nuns. 

 

Michaela: Watching the show, it was just exactly how we lived. The Army came on the school buses.