Fred Olsen Travel has acquired Worldspan Travel, taking its total shop network to 16.
It picked up the store, based on the outskirts of Bournemouth, last week after being approached by the owners who were looking to retire after 40 years on the high street.
Fred Olsen Travel head of commercial, Paul Hardwick, explained the opportunity had been presented to him in December after an agreed sale to another party had fallen through due to the pandemic.
Hardwick has retained all of Worldspan Travel’s staff, including the manager who has worked there for 30 years and a senior sales manager who has 18 years’ service.
He told Travel Weekly: “Like everyone, we’ve been trying to manage our way through the pandemic. But we’ve also been trying to find some opportunities that will allow us to grow bigger and stronger as we come out of this.
“Worldspan had some brilliant staff there and decent levels of forward business. Obviously at the moment, we can’t guarantee what’s going to go ahead in the future, but we could see what they were doing pre-pandemic and we knew we could bring over fantastic staff that would benefit our business, so it seemed a no brainer.
“We went for it and it’s really great to get another [shop] to add to our portfolio.”
The branch will continue trading as Worldspan Travel with ‘part of Fred Olsen Travel’ added to its fascia.
Hardwick said he would put one of his team into the store temporarily to help with the transition but that very little would change.
“We don’t want to change what was going really well before the pandemic,” he said. “It’s just about adding in a bit of our marketing and we’ll probably put a lick of paint on it in the next couple of weeks, but nothing too much.”
The acquisition of Worldspan Travel follows what Hardwick described as a “collaboration” with Milford Travel in Hampshire last year, whereby Fred Olsen acquired the business, did not keep the unit but transferred the two part-time staff and customer database to its own nearby shop.
Hardwick explained: “We didn’t keep the branch because we’ve got a branch only four or five miles down the road.
“When restrictions allow, we intend to do bi-weekly pop ups back in the town opposite where the shop was, where we can hold travel clinics, and the old staff will go over and reengage in the local community for those [customers] that perhaps don’t want to travel across to our new branch.”
New Fred Olsen Travel branch in Beccles, Suffolk
Hardwick has also opened a new branch of Fred Olsen Travel in Beccles, Suffolk – even fitting it out and painting it himself with the help of managing director Steve Williams and the new branch manager, in order to keep costs low during the pandemic.
He said: “We’ve been looking at it for a few years. We knew it was the right area to be in for one of our shops – and then the pandemic came along. I continued to go and have a look at opportunities when they occurred and we found a unit that became available at the beginning of this year.
“It may seem crazy that this was in full lockdown that we were trying to purchase another new shop, but we managed to secure a relatively short lease with a short break in it so that wasn’t too much of a risk; I managed to find a good member of staff who I thought could come in and create a successful branch and because of the flexi-furlough scheme, I had staff that I could pull in without having to recruit any extra people.”
Hardwick added: “I said to the board, I’ll get some paint, and I’ll do the painting – and the MD came and got involved, one of the branch managers from another store came and helped, that the new manager that was going to come in, came and helped as well. So it was a real team effort to get this together and it is now my favourite store.
“It was really fantastic that we were actually able to get this one up and ready to open on April 12, when all of the retail opened across the country. The mayor of the town came and opened us and we’ve done some promotions with local businesses to ingratiate ourselves into the town.
“Obviously, sales are not huge and the timing probably couldn’t have been any worse with all of the stuff that’s gone on over the last few months, but this was all about the future. It was about doing something low risk and low cost, build and grow as business rebounds.”
Hardwick said he would be interested to hear from anyone with a good business, looking to retire, or for an exit strategy, or even some kind of collaboration to help them continue to trade.
“I would say nothing’s off the table at the moment,” he said.