Chief executive James Thornton to deliver vision in keynote address to Abta’s Travel Convention. Ian Taylor reports
Intrepid Travel aims to become the world’s first billion-dollar adventure company and to do so while balancing “purpose” with profit-making.
That is the vision of chief executive James Thornton, who will deliver a keynote address to Abta’s Travel Convention in Marrakech in October.
Thornton joined Intrepid 17 years ago from a background in financial management, or “making rich people richer” as he puts it. He has been chief executive for six years.
Speaking after travelling around Europe for five weeks, Thornton said: “There are lots of challenges right now. But they’re challenges we would be desperate for if we went back six months. The pandemic shutdown was brutal. Now we’re trying to rebuild a complex ecosystem.”
Yet he noted: “Intrepid revenues in June were 93% of 2019’s level. We’re starting to feel more robust.”
Intrepid carried 470,000 customers on 1,000 trips to 100 countries in 2019, a far cry from its founding in 1989 by Australian friends Darrell Wade and Geoff Manchester.
But Thornton has bigger plans, explaining: “Adventure travel, where you meet local people and try local food, has gone from being niche to one of the fastest-growing sectors. We’ve proved you can be commercially successful but run with purpose.”
Thornton is keen to talk about Intrepid’s status as a B-Corporation, an independently run process which assesses a company’s social and environmental performance. Intrepid attained B-Corp certification in 2018, making it now one of more than 5,000 B-Corp companies.
The B stands for ‘beneficial’, with certified companies required to meet standards of transparency, accountability, sustainability and performance in creating value for ‘stakeholders’, not just traditional shareholders but employees, the community, environment, suppliers and customers.
Thornton said: “B-Corp certification is still in its infancy. We signed up in 2015. I thought we’d do it in three months. It took three years, but it should take time.”
He argued: “We believe in a different way of doing business. We try to deliver profitable returns. But profit is the output of what we do, not the reason for it.”
Thornton noted: “It’s easier to go B-Corp if you’re a small company. You don’t have to be perfect, but you do have to benefit all shareholders and not just run for quarterly returns.”
That was a fundamental difference when Intrepid was part of Tui between 2010 and 2015, with Tui “managed for quarterly profitability”. Thornton said the company “managed to extract itself” by buying out Tui’s controlling stake.
Now he talks about growing the market for “experience‑rich travel” and bringing what he calls “casual intensity” to Intrepid, explaining: “We want to create a business that is profitable and purpose-led, and be number-one in the industry.”
The focus of that intensity will be the UK and US for the time being. He said: “We’re pretty much a household name in Australia. One-third of our customers are US, a third UK and a third Australian. But the UK and US will be 70%-80% of our business in two to three years.”