A couple based in Lanzarote working with Your Holiday Booking have secured a £72,000 sale with Gold Medal’s Pure Luxury brand.
Ex-pats Julie and Mike Cliffe-Jones run their Camel Travel agency from an office in a restored camel shed in Haría, north Lanzarote.
They moved to the Canary islands in 2001 and later established a business with their destination website called Lanzarote Information.
In 2014, they joined Your Holiday Booking – one of Vertical Travel Group’s homeworking divisions – after meeting the agency’s team at World Travel Market in London.
“It took us a few years and a steep learning curve, but by 2019, we had a successful agency,” said Julie.
“It was quite heavily focused, inevitably, on bookings for the Canary Islands. Our client base is almost entirely in the UK.
“Then Covid happened. During a very difficult two years, we decided to re-focus, reduce our reliance on the Canaries market and seek to attract higher spending clients.
“The last year has been our best ever.”
The £72,000 booking was for a week at the Shangri-La Hambantota in Sri Lanka, followed by a week at the Lux South Ari Atoll in the Maldives for Easter 2024.
The customers are a party of six – a family of four and a couple – who had previously booked a £41,000 holiday to the Hard Rock in Punta Cana for December 2023.
“Although they live in the UK, they own properties here in Lanzarote,” said Julie.
“We’ve never met – they contacted us because they were aware of the work we do to support and promote Lanzarote and they thought we were nice people.”
The couple clinched the booking with Stacy Caunce, their contact at Pure Luxury, who “was brilliant throughout the whole process”.
Caunce helped to sort the reservations while Mike and Julie were travelling back from a conference and about to board a flight.
“Now long-haul travel is back and clients have the confidence to go further afield, we will be using [Gold Medal] much more,” said Julie.
“Cruise Plus [another Gold Medal brand] is also brilliant for our tailor-made fly-cruise clients.”
Julie commented: “We’ve been running our own businesses now for nearly 20 years, and we love the freedom it gives us to take time for ourselves when we need it, and, of course, to travel extensively.
“It means we have periods of really hard work and long hours, but the payoff is plenty of time off exploring the world.”
Mike added: “I really dislike the term ‘homeworker’. We are part of a large group of professional, independent travel agencies that work under the umbrella of the excellent Vertical Travel Group marketing, admin and support teams.”
The couple made another lucrative booking worth about £27,000 for a holiday at Ikos Odisia in Corfu within just a few days of their “big one”, and are now hoping to keep the momentum going for the rest of 2023.
The Vertical Travel Group has several other agencies based overseas within its homeworking division, which has the Holiday Elite and Instant Holidays brands as well as Your Holiday Booking.
Four are in Spain, one in Crete, one in Jersey and one in Cyprus – and all can sell to UK customers, with the same back-office support and services as UK-based agents.