G Adventures UK Managing Director Brian Young has praised agents for grasping opportunities to sell adventure travel and tours to customers, after the operator reported a record-breaking July and a 20% growth in UK and global sales for the last financial year, which ended in July for the operator.
Global sales for July were up 40%, while UK sales rose by 27%. The growth has been split equally between direct and trade sales.
Brian said: “What we’re seeing is that the travel agent community is really starting to get to grips with adventure travel and touring and understanding the product.
“One thing that’s important for us at G Adventures is that we have price parity in the market, so we never undercut any of our travel agent partners.”
G Adventures stepped up its commitment to the trade with the appointment of Nick Hughes to the newly created role as Director of Growth UK in April. Joe Swatland was appointed Global Purpose Specialist (GPS) for the Midlands earlier this year, marking the first such appointment in the region since before COVID. Anthony McIntyre joined in the summer as GPS for the North West.
Going forward, Nick and his team will be working with travel agents to look at how G Adventures can support them further, whether that’s through training, development, working with agents on the ground, or marketing, said Brian. “Those are all the kind of things that Nick’s working on with the sales team.”
More than 300 itineraries have been added in the past 12 months – a mixture of new trips and product relaunches. “It’s probably the most ambitious product launch in a year that we’ve had in our history,” Brian said.
“We’re very good at understanding the trends, so the launch of new products plays into new destinations that we see emerging, and we bring them into the marketplace. This invigorates our product offering and gives something new to our customers.”
Brian said G Adventures’ Solo-ish brand, which it launched in October 2024, has been ‘really popular’. “It’s exceeded passenger volume since it launched by about 40% compared to other travel styles, so it’s gone exceptionally well,” he added.
Solo-ish caters for solo travellers and builds in ice-breaker experiences, such as cookery classes. More than 75% of Solo-ish bookings are made by female travellers, with popular destinations including Morocco, Vietnam, Greece and China.
New destinations in G Adventures’ core product range include Moldova, Pakistan and Panama, while nine new Canada trips have been added to the programme for 2026, partly ‘to compensate for some drop off in the US’, Brian said. There’s been ‘a significant rebound’ in bookings to Jordan, he said, with the UK market up 84% in the last 12 months. It comes after the operator launched new adventure experiences in the country.
Also new are small ship sailings in Sri Lanka and expedition cruises in the Arctic.
“There has also been a reimagining and understanding of our current trip portfolio. We have put in a lot of work over the last 12 months to look at the existing portfolio and see how we can reconstruct it to some degree,” Brian said.
Other trending destinations include Central Asia, with UK bookings to Uzbekistan up 75%; Kazakhstan up 56%. Elsewhere, UK sales to Peru grew 11% year-on-year.
G Adventures will be holding its next GX Summit in Jordan in September, where further annoucments are set to be made.
See also: Meet the… G Adventures new GPS, former chef Joe Swatland
