A DAY WITH... MISS ELLIES TRAVEL
Staff camaraderie and quality service see customers queueing outside at Miss Ellies Travel in Urmston. Ben Ireland pays a visit
A human-sized Statue of Liberty model stands proud at the back of Miss Ellies Travel, overlooking the shop in the Greater Manchester town of Urmston. In its left hand it holds a book inscribed with the date July IV – which is a fitting touch as it was on America’s Independence Day, back in 1988, that Miss Ellies Travel opened in Urmston. The agency’s roots were in central Manchester. Founder Ellie Doherty opened her first store in Oldham Road, near the city’s famous Northern Quarter, in January 1987.
UP CLOSE AND PERSONAL
EMMA PALFREY, TRAVEL CONSULTANT I’ve been in travel for… 20 years. I started at Miss Ellies in 1998, became a rep for Thomson (now Tui), and worked at Holidays By
Phone and Thomson before rejoining Ellies. If I wasn’t an agent… I’d have tried to be a professional figure skater. My favourite destination to sell is… Barbados. I’m trained in long-haul, but I’m an expert in Croatia and I know Menorca because that’s where I worked as a rep.
KERRY LEWIS, TRAVEL CONSULTANT I’ve been in travel… since 2001. I worked for Going Places when it merged with Thomas Cook. I joined Miss Ellies from Cook in March.
I work for an independent because… I get a wider choice of holidays to sell and you can really get to know your customers. My favourite destination… to sell is either New York or Vegas. To visit I love St Petersburg, on the Gulf Coast in Florida – I got married there.
ANDREA MURPHY, SENIOR CONSULTANT I’ve been in travel… for 30 years. All of them at Ellie’s. If I wasn’t an agent… I’d be a murder detective. I like to sell… Las Vegas. I
get bored of booking flights to Malaga. A customer once… needed to take a defibrillator on a flight. We weren’t sure of its size to take it as hand luggage – so he brought the thing into the shop and plonked it on my desk for us to measure. He probably could have called us with the measurements.
The Urmston store soon followed and it was there that it became embedded into the local community. It moved from a smaller site in Flixton Road to its current site on thriving high street Crofts Bank Road in 2005. The Manchester branch closed in March 2011, moving to Heaton Chapel in Stockport for a brief stint until August 2012 when the staff all moved to Urmston. Andrea Murphy, who has worked for Miss Ellies since day one, explained: “When we were in Manchester, you obviously get the
footfall that a big city generates, but our conversions weren’t high. In Urmston, I would genuinely say that 98% of people who come in are booking. Some of our regulars make a day of it. It’s a little gold mine.” And what makes their conversion rate so
high? “It’s the personal touch,” says Andrea. “Our customers really know us. We’re all best friends and that comes across in our sales. A lot of customers have their favourite agents, so they’ll come in specifically to see Emma (Palfrey), Natalie (Grogan) or Kerry (Lewis).
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travelweekly.co.uk 27 September 2018
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