JANE CHADWICK GoCruise & Travel Specialises in: Cruising
Why did you choose to focus on cruising? I have cruised all my life. My first cruise was when I was just three years old, so cruising is in my blood. This year I am celebrating 30 years in travel and the past 19 of those have been with GoCruise & Travel. I always wanted to run my own cruise travel business and GoCruise lets me run my business the way I want.
Do you sell anything else? I focus on cruise only and choose not to sell other holiday types. Cruise is where my speciality lies. My clients trust my opinions and know that I will find the right fit for them.
What’s the key to success? Understanding your client and their needs. Booking the wrong
SOPHIE SHRUBSOLE Simplexity Travel
Specialises in: Wartime heritage tours
What exactly do you sell and what is a typical itinerary? Sophie’s Great War Tours is a specialist tour operator and travel agent (Simplexity Travel is helping me grow my presence as an agent) that helps guests uncover and connect with their family’s military past. We research their relatives’ wartime history, then design personalised tours that allow them to walk in their footsteps. Through our research, we take guests to villages where their relative would have camped, following their journey into battle. If their relative was killed in the First World War, we can visit their grave or see their name inscribed on a local memorial. It’s a deeply meaningful way for people to understand not just where their family came from, but what they went through.
How did it all start? It’s all my dad’s fault! While other families were off to Spanish beaches, we were exploring battlefields. Thankfully, I loved it. That passion led me to study history at the University of Birmingham. After graduating, I noticed during my travels that there was a real gap in the market for high-quality, deeply researched and responsibly run historical tours. So in 2013, I took the leap and started the business.
Do you face much competition? There isn’t a great deal of competition, because what we offer is truly specialist. We don’t just book battlefield tours, we carry out detailed
16 JULY 2025
research into each guest’s family military history, often uncovering stories and records they’ve never seen before. That level of depth and personalisation sets us apart.
How does Simplexity support you in this field? Simplexity Travel – a Virtuoso agency – has global reach and strong industry partnerships, which allow me to secure exclusive benefits for my clients. As demand for my tours grew, it became clear I needed to be affiliated with an agency that could commercially support the volume of bookings I was handling, and Simplexity provides that.
travelweekly.co.uk
client profile onto the wrong cruise type could be a disaster.
How do you promote yourself? Social media (GoCruise with Jane on Facebook) is always popular with my clients and followers. They love to come along with me on my cruise adventures. While I’m not pretending to be an influencer, it does work for me. I say it how it is and blog my day-to-day experience on board, and it works.
How do you keep up with all the changes in the sector? Training with GoCruise is ongoing; hardly a day goes by without online training being offered by a cruise line or tour operator. We are given lots of ship visit opportunities, but having been in the industry for so long it’s rare for an opportunity to come along that I haven’t experienced in one form or another. But I’m always looking for new ways to learn.
PICTURES: John Chadwick;
ivanweiss.london
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