Stuart Parish is managing director of Travel Weekly
In just over a month from now (August 9, 2014) Travel Weekly Group will be celebrating five years as an independent company, and what a difference those five years have made.
We bought into a brand and product portfolio we felt held an iconic place in the UK travel trade, but we were also aware that it was a brand that had suffered neglect and underinvestment in the years preceding the deal. Taking into account the complicated extraction of an entire business unit from a large corporate environment, and setting it out on its own from a new home in Victoria, and the challenge was not small.
Fast-forward five years and we now have undeniably the market-leading media portfolio for the industry; Travel Weekly has grown substantially across print and digital channels, and now has over 40 events per year scaling from The Globe Travel Awards at 1,200 attendees through to our exclusive Executive Dinners for no more than thirty hand-picked guests.
We’ve launched exciting new products such as our luxury travel club, Aspire, and enhanced our position as leaders in news and analysis through our Travel Weekly Business portfolio. I also believe we’ve acquired well with the likes of the Agent Achievement Awards and Travel & Hospitality Hall of Fame feeling like they should always have been part of Travel Weekly Group.
Within the past fortnight we revealed our acquisition of TravelGBI, and in just under three months we will be holding our first exclusive Connections event for high-end buyers and suppliers in the luxury sector.
What next?
Next year Travel Weekly will be 45 years old, but that’s just a number, and sometimes we’re all guilty of looking at what’s gone before, rather than what lies ahead. Heritage is important, but it counts for nothing if you’re not evolving it into something which retains relevance in the modern world.
This is one of our biggest achievements to date. We’re rightly proud of our print products which remain core to our business, but we’ve become a business more adept at servicing the different needs of its client base across multiple channels. We’ve taken a business which had fallen behind the times and moulded it into something which is modern and relevant, something which is reflective of the dynamic and demanding sector we serve.
Throughout this development we’ve never taken our eye off our customer, we’ve never created a product for our own vanity; we have scaled by adding products that remain relevant to our readers and to our industry partners. We believe we can scale whilst still remaining niche.
There is always room for improvement and that’s what makes running a business exciting, but five years down the line we have foundations well set which give us breathing space to be ambitious with what we choose to build on top of them.
It’s been exciting to watch the business develop and see the industry’s reaction to each improvement we’ve made along the way, but what’s even more exciting is there’s still so much more to come. Watch this space.