Onto the next venture

As you can see it's been a while since I posted to this Blog. The main reason is that in October 2008 I sold my stake in SpeedBreaks. Trading conditions at the time were extremely difficult. We'd had to deal with the collapse of the pound against the Euro and a severe recession.

As if the direct effect of reduced bookings and increased cancellations wasn't bad enough we also had to deal with the collapse of Excel airlines in Autumn 2008. We had quite a number of flights booked with Excel at the time. For a small business already having a tough time it almost felt like the last straw as we then had to rebook all the flights at inflated prices with another operator. And ATOL of course provides no protection for small travel firms caught in this dilemna.

Then just a couple of weeks ago I heard that SpeedBreaks (since renamed Adventura.com) had gone into administration. The recession, the low margins, the weak pound finally did for it. It's a real shame as I still think it's a great concept and with a little more luck it would have succeeded.

My new, much delayed project is www.westcountrylets.co.uk. The new website has been built in Joomla with a special extension called Joomres to handle the booking side of things. The site has been expertly designed by Andreas Pohancenik at PRACTICE + THEORY. Joomla is of course PHP but all the customisation and bespoke build has been done by the excellent Hazel Wilson at www.highlandvision.com