Luke Skinner, the former owner of Holidaysplease Hay-on-Wye, has teamed up with Ross Griffiths, who launched Your Endless Travel – with the support of The Holiday Franchise Company – in 2020.  

Skinner and Griffiths decided to start working together shortly after Travel Counsellors bought Holidaysplease last year despite only meeting a few weeks before the acquisition. 

Fast forward 15 months, the two have now relaunched Your Endless Travel as a homeworking business under Protected Trust Services.

“After the news came out about Travel Counsellors acquiring Holidaysplease, I think we both realised changes were coming, changes that were out of our control and would impact our businesses going forward," Skinner told TTG. “We thought about what the next steps would be for our businesses. We both wanted to have more control of our businesses.”

He added: “We’re really excited about relaunching Your Endless Travel. We discussed it for a a while and we both felt our businesses would benefit from being in partnership. We’re looking forward to building a business that is greater than the sum of its parts.”

Recruitment targets

The co-founders are officially relaunching Your Endless Travel on Wednesday (3 July) with two new websites – yourendless.travel and dedicated careers hub careers.yourendless.travel.  

Initially, they specifically want to hire experienced homeworkers or people who have left the travel sector and want to retrain.

Skinner said he will be looking to recruit between six and eight homeworkers in the next few weeks. “Our plan is to have at least 20 homeworkers by the end of the year and we want to have 40 in the next couple of years,” he added.

Your Endless Travel currently has two staff – product and operations manager Katie Hollinshead and homeworking agent Suzy O’Sullivan – in addition to the co-founders. Next month, Skinner and Griffiths will run a virtual training session for new staff.

In 2025, the pair hope to recruit homeworking agents who are “completely new to travel”. Skinner and Griffiths have already identified different sectors outside travel from which workers may potentially have skills that can be transferred across into travel.

Reflecting on his own entry into the travel industry in 2006, Skinner started alongside 10 to 15 other homeworking agents at Holidaysplease.

“Without blowing my own trumpet, it’s fair to say that I was the top seller within that group,” said Skinner. “I was the first person to do £100,000 of sales in a month and £1 million in a year. The numbers speak for themselves.” 

But, according to Skinner, it was Griffiths who made the expanded agency business’ first booking – an £18,000 Antarctica cruise with Ponant booked through expedition cruise specialist Polar Routes last week. “This was our first booking with Protected Trust Services,” Skinner confirmed.

Your Endless Travel homeworkers can earn up to 70% of the commission payment from each booking they make depending on whether they generated the lead themselves and how many sales they made that month, explained Skinner.

“We’re going to be offering a market-leading commission split – up to 70% of commission goes to the homeworker and up to 30% goes to us,” he said.

“We’re going to be doing a lot and spending a lot on marketing and enquiry generation. Agents who join us will not have to worry about enquiry generation. However, they will earn more commission if they bring in their own leads.” 

’Never say never’ 

When asked if he and Griffiths would consider opening a physical branch, Skinner replied: “Never say never.”

The business has just signed a lease to rent a building in the centre of Hereford, but Skinner insists that it will function as an office space rather than an actual shop branch.

However, he added: “We’re here to support agents who want to sell in the way that they want to sell. If an agent wanted to open up their own premises, we would support them.”

Despite having 15,000 customers on their respective databases, Skinner said they won’t contact clients about their new partnership until some homeworking agents have been recruited.

“Currently, we do not have the capacity to service hundreds of enquiries – we need homeworkers to come on board to give us that capacity,” he said.