I got into the travel industry by accident. Five years ago I was approached by an ex-colleague with the idea of starting a speed dating company. SpeedDater was the result. With a little bit of luck & a lot of hard work we managed to become the market leader during the great speed dating boom of 2003. About a year after that we were approached by a tennis coach who was interested in the idea of running a speed dating tennis weekend. The weekend was a modest success and got me thinking that if it worked for tennis, it ought to work even better for skiing.
Four years later I'm now running a company with three brands, SpeedDater, SpeedDateronline which is our online dating site and Speedbreaks which is our niche tour operator.
Running SpeedBreaks is fun, it's growing fast and seems to have some real momentum. However we're also finding it a tough business. Margins are low, it's extremely labour intensive and marketing is expensive. The long and short of it is that after 2 1/2 years we still haven't made any profit out of SpeedBreaks. Having said that we're closer to profitability than we've ever been and we've learned an awful lot along the way.
One Saturday afternoon I was looking around on Google for some travel industry blogs - to try and find some kindred spirits who while not directly competitive with us, might be facing similar issues. I couldn't find any and this blog is the result.
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