Agent seals £187k Scenic booking following training event

A Not Just Travel agent has secured a booking worth £187,000 with Scenic Luxury Cruises & Tours after attending a Travel Lounge training event in Manchester.

Gilly Bachelor, who has been a personal travel consultant with the franchise for seven years, confirmed the booking for a cruise and land tour for two customers to return to Australia and New Zealand for a two-month trip in 2028.

Bachelor expects the trip to surpass £200,000 in value when the flights and selected accommodation are added in.

She said the opportunity to join a training session in Manchester came up after she hosted an event with Scenic Group sales manager Leiza Sullivan for 20 clients in June.

Bachelor said: “I had good feedback from the clients from that day, and we did a couple of bookings, but some were not ready to book yet.

“I wanted lots more [bookings] and Leiza was fantastic, so when I attended the small and immersive training session in Manchester, it was clear I had missed stuff as I’d always thought about Scenic Eclipse for Antarctica and that’s how I tried to promote it.”

She said the training gave her the information to go back to her clients, a retired couple who had missed out on seeing Uluru, the East Coast of Australia and New Zealand on their last visit to the region in 2025.

Bachelor added: “My mindset after the event [in June] was wanting to do better. Had I not done the training and gained a better understanding of the product, I don’t think I’d ever have come to this conclusion.”

She found Scenic had a cruise and land combination that included everything the couple wanted: a land tour out of Sydney to Uluru, a visit to Cairns, two weeks on Scenic Eclipse down the East Coast, a second tour in Auckland and another two-week sailing around New Zealand.

“There are a lot of absolute gifts in the itinerary as it gives us time in between for them to meet up with friends in Sydney,” she said, adding the Owner’s Suite, overseas transfers and small-group escorted tours were “perfect” for the clients.

She said: “I’ve been wanting to get them on Scenic forever and I know they are going to love the helicopters, the Zodiac tours and the smaller ship.

“I’ve booked trips to all seven continents with them over the last three years, so I feel unbelievably lucky that I had a product I had a lot of faith in and a client that had a need and we could make it work.”