Travel Counsellors has been described in some circles as a cult - and it is a label that its chairman David Speakman is happy to accept if it is a reflection on the passion and single-minded focus on customer service that exists within the company.

“All of our Travel Counsellors are passionate people who want to do a good job - if that is a cult I will buy into that,” he tells TTG. “Staff and clients want to belong to something special, and that is when they become advocates.”

While Travel Counsellors expanded its international footprint last year in the United Arab Emirates, adding to operations in Ireland, the Netherlands, South Africa, Australia and Canada, Speakman says the company is reining in its global plans somewhat this year.

“We’ve expanded when it’s been tough times. What we have done is spent a lot of money on technology and we’ve got one platform across the world. We are doing a lot of processing back into Bolton and we now have massive economies of scale,” he says.

Now, however, is a time for the company to focus on its core values of building ever closer customer relationships, says Speakman. “We are taking a breather at the minute - but we have loads of ideas. We believe there are a lot of challenges coming up at the moment. There is the Package Travel Directive, there is the Iata New Distribution Capability - I don’t think it will fly,” he adds.

Golden habits

Speakman constantly talks about “passion”, “innovation”, “technology”, “processes” and “relationships” during our interview, and explains that his obsession with process has driven much of the company’s service philosophy.

“We have ‘Golden Habits’ that we put in the process. What builds a relationship with one person, if you replicate that, you build a relationship with another person, which is how you build relationships.

“One of those things is to phone the customers the day before they travel and see if they are all right. You then phone them when they return to see if they had a good time. That’s why we have the highest NPS (net promoter score) in the world,” he claims.

“All of our Travel Counsellors are passionate people who want to do an amazing job - and if that sounds like a cult I will buy into that any day”

David Speakman

According to Speakman, Travel Counsellors achieves an NPS, a concept invented by the business writer Fred Reichheld that is focused on customer service, of 94, which he claims makes it the top company in the world. “Half of all Travel Counsellors get 100,” he adds.

The travel boss says while the NPS is a quantitative theory, it is also a qualitative concept, which drives growth. “Your customers promote you so it’s a qualitative thing. You could say it’s stating the obvious but we have found massive growth when you put this into your business - and our top scorer wins a BMW at our conference each year,” he says.

Know the numbers

The growth that Speakman is talking about is demonstrated in the company’s sales performance. According to him, since the start of the financial year in November, Travel Counsellors’ sales are up 10.8%. In the UK this is 13.1% and a particularly strong performance was registered two weeks ago, he states, when the UK figures were up 25%. He is modest when questioned what is driving this growth: “We are doing well and tightening up our processes.”

And keeping an eye on the figures is easy for the chairman - thanks to a handy app on his smartphone - built especially by the Travel Counsellors’ IT department. This is vital, he says.

“It’s what they say on Dragons’ Den and they are right: ‘Always know your numbers’.”

With such a single-minded focus on his own company, I ask Speakman which other firms in travel he admires. For an entrepreneur who has built his own empire on doing things his own way his choices are particularly corporate and both listed companies: Thomson and easyJet.

“Thomson is good for what it does. It has created its own product and brand and it has that with the Dreamliner and its own hotels, so it can cut the agent out. That is right for Thomson and its caustomers want that, so why should Thomson pay agents to do it,” he says.

On the airline side he says it’s the famous orange no-frills brand, and its chief executive Carolyn McCall that stands out. “EasyJet is really changing things with this new boss, which is really refreshing. I love anyone who tries to be excellent and I mean that. I like independence,” he says.

While Speakman wants all the Travel Counsellors to be in the so-called service “cult” built on passion and service, he accepts that there are many ways to build
a successful travel company provided the focus remains firmly on the customer.

How it all started

Although Speakman started out in travel, he also had a stint in the restaurant business before starting Travel Counsellors. In 1988 he opened an American diner in Bolton. “We looked after the kids, we had proper chefs. It was

at the time that McDonalds was just starting to move into the high street but I didn’t really want to be a restaurateur so I sold it for half a million pounds after 10 months,” he said.

A few months later he tried to repeat the experience by opening another restaurant but described his second stint as a “disaster”. “We had the wrong site, my partner packed it in after three months; there was the Gulf War and Black Monday. That said, the food wasn’t as good as it should have been. And me not being a restaurateur I was looking at the processes,” he said. This experience showed him that it was the travel trade that he wanted to be in - he had originally started as a travel agency in 1978, which he had sold.

“Then I set up Travel Counsellors, I came back into the industry because I loved it. I love technology and gadgets and I respected good travel consultants. Consultants don’t know everything but they will go and find it.”