Tours for introverts: Travel leader launches bespoke self-guided tours firm for Asia and Europe
A travel leader has launched a bespoke self-guided tours firm to cater for people wanting to experience and holiday in Asia and Europe without the need to join group tours.
Barry Moore, who co-founded the multi-award winning youth travel brand Party Hard Travel in 2014, was inspired to set up Touring Highlights after his own travelling experience across Asia.
Touring Highlights is aimed at couples, families and friends, launching with tours to Thailand, Vietnam, Italy, Portugal, Central Europe and Spain, with the UK, USA and additional destinations in Asia and Europe available later in 2022.
Barry Moore set up Touring Highlights after spotting a gap in the market during his travels across South East Asia, commenting:
“On most tours of Asia and Europe, you’ll be in a group of 15-20 people, and that’s fine for some people but others, myself included, couldn’t think of anything worse than being on a tour with 15 random people they don’t know. The alternative is organising everything yourself, but that takes a lot of time to plan, which most people don’t have.
“I could see the potential for a travel brand focused on adventure, culture and discovery, taking the best parts of group tours, such as seeing the highlights of a country in a short space of time and the luxury of having your hotels, flights, accommodation and coaches arranged for you, with the freedom and flexibility you get when you travel independently.
“Another big USP for Touring Highlights is that there is an activity every day during a 7 day trip. You don’t always get that with a traditional group tour. I believe there’s a niche here, for couples with children who have just flown the nest and want that adventure but security too, or families with children who want a more cultural holiday.”
Customers will receive their itinerary through a Touring Highlights app, which will deliver key information for the traveller, including flight times, coach and hotel details. Touring Highlights has membership of Protected Trust Services (PTS) to enable it to offer regulation compliant package travel to its customers. Touring Highlights will sell packages direct to customers, and through a partnership with other PTS membership, including World Travel Lounge and their 7 high street stores in the North West of England for both b2b and b2c sales.
David McDonald is the managing director of World Travel Lounge and said touring is a big growth area for travellers:
“As travel starts up once more, people are looking for more experiential holidays, especially millennials in the 25-40 age group. Most of the touring companies are guided, so Touring Highlights is unique in the flexibility it offers which will be really appealing to Millennials. They want to travel on their own terms, and have that flexibility to go off the beaten track if they want whilst having the planning done for them. Touring Highlights is breaking the mould of touring.
“Our infrastructure partnership with Touring Highlights will see us dedicating a certain amount of support to Touring Highlights, through our high street stores, as well as our head office and support centre. The partnership gives World Travel Lounge an exciting new product to sell, and gives Touring Highlights access to our strong sales team and support to bring the product to consumers. The last two years have been very challenging for the travel industry, but we’re all now on the road to recovery, and collaborations and partnerships are key.”
The Adventure Travel Trade Association’s Adventure Travel Trends Snapshot December 2020 found that Central Asia was amongst the hottest trending adventure travel destinations, with custom trips being the most in demand and hiking/trekking/walking, cultural and wellness being the top three trending adventure travel experiences in Asia. 30% of adventure travellers to Asia were in the 41-50 category, and 27% in the 29-40 age group, the highest proportion of these age groups across the adventure travel destinations of North America, Central America, South America, Africa, Europe and Asia. The average trip length for Asia was 7.7 days.
Moore, 31, a graduate of Portsmouth University, set up Party Hard Travel alongside fellow graduate Nathan Cable. Moore said: “With Party Hard Travel we built the best holidays for 18-24 year olds, giving them exactly what they want from a holiday and I still believe Party Hard offers the best clubbing holidays around. Touring Highlights is completely different and is reflective of the type of holiday I want to take now, as a 30 something.”
A team of 4 will join Barry on his mission to make Touring Highlights the byword for self-guided travel, thanks to the government’s Kickstart Scheme, which provides funding to employers to create jobs for 16-24 year olds who have been unable to find work in the current job market.
“As any founder working in the travel industry will tell you, it is intense building a brand, and the strains of the pandemic have taken their toll. My aim at Touring Highlights is to build a flexible team, stay lean as a brand, and make wellbeing a core philosophy. Some might say now isn’t a great time to launch a new travel brand but I believe the opposite. As we return to some normality, everyone is going to want to see the world, the market will only increase, particularly for adventure travel.”
A 7 night Touring Highlights tour of North Thailand starts at £699 per person, excluding flights.
