Club Voyages has opened its first shop in Clarendon Park, Leicester.
The luxury tailor-made travel agency was launched online by former travel trade journalist Sam Ballard in 2022 and has reached 17-18 homeworkers.
Ballard said the decision to open a shop in his local area was in part to support his homeworking staff, grow the company’s presence on the high street and offer something different to the local community.
Initially he thought about opening an office as he “hated” working from home but reconsidered, adding: “We’re so embedded in this community. I live literally two minutes away from this shop. I’m here, so I can’t really afford to mess it up. These are my neighbours.”
The shop, based in the premises of a former estate agent, has had a soft opening this week, with an opening party scheduled for Friday, September 6.
People have already been coming in to make enquiries and “test” out the team, Ballard told Travel Weekly, with queries ranging from bespoke walking holidays in Ireland, trains across Europe, a round-the-world adventure, and trips to Uzbekistan.
The local community is “quite a cultured crowd” he explained, and many enquiries have been from people that wanted be travellers rather than tourists who are looking for different authentic experiences.
Club Voyages has leafleted the whole area and spoken to local influencers to make sure its promotion is “hyper local”, feeding back into being “a service for the community”.
He said: “We are geared up to serve Clarendon Park in Leicester. We could have just opened something in the city centre, but it’s a slightly out of town agency that’s on a very, very local high street.
“Here you get people invested in a local area, and people that really want your high street to survive and to flourish.”
The feedback from local people has been “overwhelmingly positive”, said Ballard, who insisted there is “a real place on the high street for travel agents”.
He said: “It’s all started really well and the way we’ve done the shop is very different. We really tried for it to not look like a typical agency.”
Two examples of this are the antique furniture and lack of large branding, which Ballard hopes will “create a relaxing environment” for people to come in and enjoy “our consultative approach”.
The shop has one full-time member of staff and Ballard is eyeing expansion within the store and beyond.
He has already started collecting CVs and applications to bring in more staff at the shop as it has space for more desks.
Ballard said: “My hope is that we get everything right, and then as we approach peaks, we look at whether we want to strengthen that workforce further.
“That would be the ideal, but I think it’s important to make sure that with the first one we bed in properly first, before we eye up any expansion.”