ENTREPRENEURS

The Travel Fanatics Who

Created Their Own Holiday
Company
Alison Coleman Senior Contributor
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Aug 4, 2022, 07:51am EDT 0

A new travel experience GETTY

It sounds like a serious traveler’s dream, starting your own

holiday company, not tied to any one provider to ensure a
broader range of offerings, with prices 25% to 40% cheaper than
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anywhere else.

That dream became a reality for travel enthusiasts Brett Norton

and Stephen Knight when they launched their travel startup,
Ultimate Travel Club, during lockdown. The pair are also travel
industry veterans and called on their combined knowledge and
 experience in commercial strategy and marketing for travel,
leisure and hospitality businesses to develop their concept.

CEO Norton says: “We are both travelers first, and as travelers,
we want greater flexibility, more choice and real impartiality. But
we’re also all in the travel industry, so we know that traditional
companies aren’t set up to offer all this at a reasonable price,
which is why we went ahead and created our own travel
company.”

Central to Ultimate Travel Club is its subscription model,

charging members an annual fee of £99 ($120). Business revenue
comes from subscription fees rather than from what members
purchase via the site, including holidays, cruises, flights, or car
hire.

As Norton explains, traditional travel firms are built around

inherited infrastructure and high overheads, adding additional
costs that get passed on to the customer.

“Our business was specifically designed to provide flexible travel

at the best prices, says Norton. “It’s because we don’t have the
legacy business model and costs that established travel
companies have that we are often 40% cheaper than other
providers. Last week, our live online price comparison tool
showed that 91% of searches were cheaper with us than with
other holiday providers.”

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 Ultimate Travel Club was soft-launched at the end of 2021. The
founders used feedback from their first members to tweak the
customer journey. They invested in the platform by opening up
free search access for all online and developed a price-
comparison widget before launching an official marketing
campaign.

While most members search and book online, aided by a

members’ app, the firm also has U.K.-based travel experts
available to answer questions and make bespoke telephone
bookings. Alongside the consumer proposition, the company has
developed business travel, partnership and employee benefits
propositions

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Launching a travel business during the pandemic was always

going to be challenging, with frequent changes to the travel rules
and the fact that the founders couldn’t meet physically as a team
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as they prepared to launch the business.

“Regular check-ins kept us aligned, and while we are still cloud-

based, our customer experience staff are working in shared office
spaces to suit them,” says Norton. “We meet daily online and
 physically in London every month. We have made a virtue out of
being virtual.”

The startup secured £250,000 in seed investment from several

angel investors, while the rest of the funding came from several
founder members and the directors themselves.

Membership is currently doubling every month, and to date,

those members have collectively made savings of more than £1.6
million ($2 million). “Within two years, we would be
disappointed if we hadn’t captured over 150,000 active
members,” says Norton.

The company employs 10 people and forecasts an annual

turnover of £5 million by the end of 2023. “The forecast is
modest and realistic,” says Norton. “We are looking for
sustainable growth, and all our revenue is going back into tech
development and marketing. We have an addressable market of
6.7 million people in the U.K. alone.”

The founders are in discussions with several well-known brands

looking to partner with Ultimate Travel Club across various
sectors and channels. Norton anticipates the B2B side of their
proposition to grow more quickly than the direct-to-consumer
element of the business.

He says: “We’ve had great feedback about how the proposition

works for individuals, companies of all sizes looking for gifts or
great ways to reward, retain and attract talent, and SMEs that
want to save on staff travel. In the future, UTC 2.0 will allow us to
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create hyper personalization using machine learning and AI to

understand and serve content based on individual travel likes
and needs; that’s when it will get very exciting.”

Follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn. Check out my website. 

Alison Coleman Follow

 I'm a freelance journalist, founder of Coleman Media. For the last 20 years
I’ve covered business stories for national and international... Read More

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