Gold Medal ‘cements’ market-leading position with ‘outstanding year’

B2B operator Gold Medal and its sister brands have seen an “outstanding” year thanks to agent-friendly developments such as curated offers, out-of-date-range product, and operational improvements.

 

Lesley Rollo, chief executive at parent company dnata Travel Group UK, said: “We’ve had a pretty outstanding year…really proud of the brands and the teams across all of our businesses.

 

“We have seen exceptional growth in the areas that we really focused on.

 

“For Gold Medal, we really have cemented our position now…further reaching that market-leading position.”

 

Simon Applebaum, managing director at Gold Medal and sister brands Incredible Journeys, Cruise Plus and Pure Luxury, said: “Of all the businesses in the Dnata portfolio globally, we – for the third year – have grown the most.  

 

“We are one of the success stories. Gold Medal is one of the jewels in the crown of Dnata’s travel portfolio.

 

“We are adding products all the time, which means we can service more agents [and] we’re finding new customers…reaching out to more people but also deepening our relationships with those who’ve worked with us for a long time.”

 

Curated offers, which launched last year, have “gone great”, he said, with more than 1,000 agents checking the deals each week.

 

Multi-centre offers have just been added to the range with plans to include cruise and touring offers, hopefully within the next 12 months.

 

The out-of-date-range product continues to grow in popularity, he added, noting: “You can ring us and get a price for nearly everything. [For] the vast majority of price points, we will price and we will guarantee it.”

 

Applebaum also pledged to improve documentation for the Gold Medal brand, which largely relies on automated processes – and sometimes generates feedback and calls about issues to sort.

He said a document integrity team was established last year, who check with suppliers if there are issues in order to resolve any problems.  

 

Furthermore, the trade team has expanded and is visiting more agents, he added.

 

“We’ve had amazing commercial success. Our performance has been phenomenal over the past three years. But we never want to get complacent,” he said.

 

“We took on a lot of new clients in the last 18 months, a lot of traditional retail clients, but also a lot of a homeworking,” he said.

 

“We opened up some existing relationships [and] gave ourselves a challenge to train an awful lot more agents.

 

“[There are] 23 people who work in our trade partnerships team now. It is a pretty big operation [and] we have new agents registering with us every single week.”

 

Rollo also highlighted the importance of customer service, saying: “We never compromise on levels of staffing, opening hours. Whatever they book through us, they’re guaranteed that gold-plated service.

 

“We made some changes in our operational area, and we brought the customer services staff closer to the sales agents…it did allow us to overflow in our peak periods…and not have such long call wait times.”

They were talking to Travel Weekly during the Gold Medal Big Day Out 2025 event at Carden Park Hotel near Chester, which hosted 90 agents and 28 suppliers.