Travel Counsellors agent Bryony Hordern plans Barbados move
After 60 years in the travel industry, most travel agents would be planning to hang up their boots.
But Travel Counsellors agent Bryony Hordern, who turns 78 in the next few weeks, is determined to buck the trend.
The former Travel Weekly Cover Star is buying a house in Barbados with husband David and plans to split her time between the Caribbean island and Oxfordshire, continuing to book holidays for family and friends rather than retire.
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“Our friends think we are barmy but life is an adventure and age is no barrier,” she said, joking: “I plan to work until I fall off my perch!”
Hordern decided to take the plunge after one of her daughters announced plans to move to Barbados later in life.
“She told us in April and I turned to my husband and said, ‘Should we do that?’
"Within a week the house was on the market and we’d booked flights to Barbados to meet an estate agent and chose a house. The plan is to live there for four months and then back here for two months,” she said.
She said she would continue to look after loyal clients and would be “touting for clients in Barbados who have a UK address” while also enjoying her “new life in the sunshine”.
Describing Travel Counsellors as a “very caring organisation”, she added: “I get lots of support from other Travel Counsellors and although I don’t do many bookings, the ones I do are chunky.”
After 60 years in the industry she said travel still “excited” her.
“I still get excited about going on a plane, going to the airport, going to Duty Free, taking off,” she said, adding: “I have been extraordinarily lucky in my career to have travelled so much. The industry is in my blood. One of the joys of being in the sector so long is seeing the people who came to see me as a rep now becoming vice presidents and managing directors.”
Hordern joined Qantas in December 1965, aged 18, initially as a shorthand typist, before going on to work for Pan Am for 12 years in the ticket office. She set up her agency Tickets Anywhere in 1982, initially as an unlicenced bucket shop, in Royston, Hertfordshire.
At its height in the late 1990s, Tickets Anywhere was turning over £8.2 million a year and had four branches; one in Cambridge, two in Thame and a business travel office in central London.
“It was long hours but luckily I had a very supportive husband as I had two children under two at that time. David was always my sounding board and he encouraged me; I couldn’t have done it without him,” said Hordern, who recalled the “golden days” of travel when airlines paid agents 9% commission as well as her lobbying efforts for agents to start charging fees in 2005.
Hordern later sold her branches, apart from the one in Thame, which she kept on until its sale to Spear Travels in 2015.
Her career also included an eight-year stint as the travel agent representative on the board of agency consortium Advantage Travel Partnership and she won the Outstanding Contribution to the Industry Award at the Travel Weekly Agent Achievement Awards in 2015.
“I had a successful business but some of it was being in the right place at the right time. And I was always really nosey; I liked to know what was going on and I learnt as a I went along. I never had any business training,” she said, adding: “The only reason I went into travel was because my sister moved to Canada when I was 16 and the only way I could think to see her was by working for an airline.”
As for retiring, she has no plans. “Once you are in travel you never leave. I’m just so excited about the next stage.”
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