How to Start a Travel Company From One Tested Idea

Most people who want to start a travel company begin with a destination or a booking system. A more useful starting point is a group of people and the feeling you want to give them. One Dutch founder built a group travel business for single travellers that now handles around 9,000 bookings a year, and his route there began with a single newspaper advertisement and a rented castle.

Harold Blanken, owner of Villa Vibes, was a copywriter at a large Amsterdam advertising agency in 2001. After the September attacks his one year contract was not renewed. In his telling, he saw it straight away as an opening: he had always invented concepts for other companies, and now he could invent one for himself.

“Ik ben altijd bezig met het verzinnen van concepten voor andere mensen. Kijk, misschien is dit een mooie kans om nu een concept voor mezelf te verzinnen.”

Harold Blanken, 1:42

(Translated: “I am always busy inventing concepts for other people. Look, maybe this is a good chance to invent a concept for myself now.”)

Start a travel company with a trip you would book yourself

His concept did not come from market research but from his own life. At 33 he still wanted to go out and meet new people, while the friends around him had stopped. He looked at the existing market for singles holidays and, in his words, did not find his kind of people there.

That is a lesson for anyone who wants to start a travel company: the first version can be built for a customer you know very well, because you are that customer. He also says that everything in his company starts with curiosity, about the customer and about yourself. By asking why something did not work for him, he found the gap in the market.

Design the group before you design the trip

In group travel, the other guests are a large part of the product. Before he chose a destination, he decided who should be in the room. He thought back to his primary school class: about 30 children from farming families, business families and everything in between, who still felt like one group. Choosing the destination itself is covered in a related article on destination management for VIP clients.

From that memory came a set of rules that still shape the concept:

• A group of about 30 people, large enough for everyone to find a few people they click with.
• A clear age band, so a 33 year old is not grouped with 18 year olds or people over 50.
• A similar level of education, which in his experience made conversations at the table go deeper.
• Everyone travels alone, so nobody arrives inside a fixed clique.

He calls it a matter of probability: no filter guarantees a good evening, but the right variables raise the chance of a real connection. A bigger group also gave him a way out if most people were not his type.

Test demand with one small advertisement

The first test cost almost nothing. In 2001 de Volkskrant still carried a page and a half of personal ads, read by many highly educated singles. He placed a short ad: a long weekend in an exclusive country house in the Ardennes, 15 men and 15 women, aged 27 to 37, with a Hotmail address to reply to. Sixty to seventy people responded for 30 places, and he booked a second weekend straight away.

He had planned a party in a castle with a good sound system and had not thought about who would cook. The guests solved it themselves: they pooled their money, did the shopping and someone took over the kitchen. In his view, people who all arrive alone are open in a way you rarely see in daily life, and everyone wants to show their most social side.

Get the pricing right and let guests shape the range

In the first year he ran a trip every other weekend. After the second weekend two guests, who organised weekends themselves, told him they had calculated a gap of 20 euros per person, 600 euros for the group. They had forgotten the advertising costs. He took it as a signal to make the business more commercial.

“Zet de goede mensen bij elkaar. En ja, uiteindelijk als de vibe goed is, is eigenlijk alles goed.”

Harold Blanken, 16:03

(Translated: “Put the right people together. And yes, in the end, if the vibe is good, pretty much everything is good.”)

Growth came from listening to the existing group. After five years of weekends only, guests asked for a winter sports trip. Because he had built an email list of people who trusted the brand, the first ski trip left with 300 people. Hiking, cycling, beach holidays and sailing followed, each one at the request of customers rather than as a plan of the founder. A related article looks at hotel packages that sell experiences.

From side project to company: team, systems and brand

If you start a travel company on enthusiasm, the knowledge lives in your own head for a long time. He and his partner did everything themselves for years, until the hallway at home was full of bottles meant as giveaways and they could no longer keep up. In 2015 they hired their first staff. The first hire had a hard time, he says, because everything sat in the founders' heads.

The turning point was a business partner from banking who saw that everything still ran in Excel and started to automate. By 2018 the team had seven people, but staff began to complain that it was unclear who did what. During the pandemic he used the quiet period to structure and automate, refunded every customer and communicated openly. A separate article covers AI travel planning and what it means for hotels.

After the pandemic the team grew from 7 to 18 people. Since 2023 the company has followed a scale up programme. Bookings went from about 4,500 before the pandemic to 9,000, and measured customer satisfaction rose from 6.5 to 8.5. Handbooks now describe the tone of voice, the core values and the reasons behind decisions.

“Want je weet gewoon de ziel, als die verdwijnt, dan kun je even kort groeien, maar dan daarna kan het zo weer voorbij zijn. Dus we willen het goede behouden, maar wel slimmer nadenken over hoe we wat schaalbaarder konden worden.”

Harold Blanken, 25:09

(Translated: “Because you simply know: if the soul disappears, you can grow for a short while, but after that it can be over just like that. So we want to keep what is good, but think more cleverly about how we could become more scalable.”)

The next step is outward. Research showed that 4 percent of the target group knows the brand spontaneously and 10 percent when prompted, so the founders are looking for a commercial managing director to build the brand. For the whole story, watch the full conversation (in Dutch).

Frequently asked questions

How do you start a travel company with little money?

In this founder's experience, if you want to start a travel company, you test one concrete trip before you build anything else. He placed one small newspaper ad for a weekend in a rented country house, received 60 to 70 replies for 30 places and booked the next weekend right away. The guests even did their own shopping and cooking.

How big should a group trip be?

He settled on about 30 people, modelled on a primary school class. In his view a group of that size is large enough for everyone to find people they click with, and mixed enough to stay interesting, while it still feels like one group at the dinner table.

When should a small travel company start hiring?

He and his partner waited until they could no longer do the work themselves, and started hiring in 2015. His lesson is that the first hires struggle when everything lives in the founders' heads. Systems, automation and written core values make that step a lot easier.

How do you grow a group travel brand without losing its character?

He describes sustainable growth as not wearing out your staff and letting customers feel that the core of the company stays intact. His company wrote handbooks on tone of voice and core values, hired on cultural fit and measured customer satisfaction before it invested in brand awareness.