Married homeworkers Geoff and Jo Wessell have ended August with their best trading weekend outside of Peaks, taking £101,353 in bookings over the bank holiday.
The total included the former Assistant Chief Constable and specialist Nurse Practitioner’s largest-ever single booking of £51,094 for a three-and-half month trip in Australia, New Zealand and Southwest US through ANZCRO.
Bristol-based Geoff said: “Over the bank holiday, it just so happened that several big trips came into fruition that we’d been working on for several weeks.
“We also booked a South American holiday with Journey Latin America for October, which was confirmed on the Friday just a few days after the clients enquired, as well as a sprinkling of TUI package holidays for October and November.”
The bookings conclude an unusually busy summer for Geoff and Jo, who run nationwide-targeted Ginge Tours & Travel and Mendip Travel, which caters to clients local to Mendip, Somerset. Both are members Protected Trust Services (PTS).
Geoff said: “In spring, bookings fell off a cliff because of the Middle East disruptions but it started to pick up again in May when confidence picked up again.
“As per most agents, we go quiet for new bookings during July and August, but we were averaging just under one booking per day, which for us, as a small unit, was only just under our peak level.”
Business has also had a boost since Geoff won Homeworking Agent of the Year and Touring and Adventure Specialist of the Year at Travel Gossip’s The Travel Agent Awards South West and Wales 2026.
Geoff said: “We did a lot of local advertising off the back of the awards. That raised our profile locally, so we did see quite a spike in local bookings following that.”
That local push has sifted the client mix: clients from the emergency services, once around 70% of the business owing to Geoff and Jo’s previous careers, now make up 60-70%. Their client base, however, still skews retired, typically booking ‘big traditional’ trips to South Africa, New Zealand and Australia for travel in October or November.
But in the European package holiday market, Geoff said he has noticed increased ‘budget consciousness’ from clients because of the cost-of-living crisis.
He added: “Whilst we don’t do a lot of it, we’re seeing hardly any family holidays, and if we are seeing family holidays, they’re never more than 10 days, invariably seven nights now. I can’t remember the last time I booked a family on a 14-night.”
Another challenge is managing expectations among clients who come with AI-generated itineraries, suggesting over budget accommodation, Geoff said.
He said: “They’ll ask ChatGPT for luxury hotels which cost the entire budget of their trip just to stay for a few nights. ChatGPT is not looking at holidays and hotels from a price perspective, it’s looking at them from reviews.”
Geoff credits PTS’s support for helping the businesses grow, saying: “They took a risk when they took us on because we didn’t have the travel background.
“But the support we get from PTS and how they have allowed us to develop where we wanted to go has been really, really useful for us.”
