Meet the team

One of the best things about working in Customer Services is getting to know some of our very diverse, and often very interesting, customers. Not to be outdone, between them the team has clocked up several years living in Spain and California; learned the art of mixology (but not the throwing-the-shaker part!); achieved a gold Duke of Edinburgh award; spent a year working as a Disney character at Walt Disney World in Florida; worked at a pre-school; managed a hotel; spent many a weekend feeding, timing and encouraging runners on long-distance races across the Moors; and trained as a volunteer magistrate who attends once-monthly court hearings. To relax, they run, walk, garden, watch motorsport, read, swim, ski, go to music festivals, and play tennis, squash, croquet and badminton.

As is the case in other teams, there’s no typical Sales Team member. Previous jobs include tasting chocolate, managing holiday-cottage bookings, leading geography field trips and outdoor activities for schools, and maintaining the garden of a stately home. The team’s interests are equally diverse, ranging from golf to gardening, cake decorating to camping (preferably of the wild variety).

The Holiday Operations Team arranges all the crucial elements (hotel reservations, taxis, luggage transfers and more) that ensure holidays run smoothly for our customers. Besides being able to speak a European language, it’s a job that requires good organisational skills and quick thinking, so working as a PA in Hamburg, as a supervisor in Marco Pierre White’s restaurant, and in travel and estate agencies, as some team members have done prior to joining Inntravel, was more relevant than you might think. For these guys, weekends feature plenty of walking, visits to museums and art galleries, trips to the cinema and practising routines on an aerial hoop (very definitely not to be confused with a hula hoop!).

Given the tailored nature of our holidays and how much information we supply our customers with – maps, route notes, historical background information, and more – there’s more to ticketing than first meets the eye. The same can be said of the people who work in the team, which includes someone who lived and worked on Tenerife for several years, and a former member of the Royal Navy who did a tour along the German coast destroying WW2 mines. When they’re not collating information packs and making sure they arrive with customers in good time before their holiday, they spend their spare time playing hockey, reading avidly and going to festivals and gigs.

Apart from all being eagle-eyed, well versed in SQL, and able (metaphorically speaking) to navigate around a spreadsheet blindfolded – essential skills for pricing our holidays and ensuring that the data is correctly loaded on to our computer system – the members of the Product Coordination Team are all very different and include a chemist, a geographer-geologist, a linguist and a former ski-resort manager. Between them they have most common sports covered – football, running, long-distance cycling, table tennis, badminton, walking, climbing and skiing – plus salsa dancing, woodworking and choir singing for good measure.

Marketing covers everything from brochure production to the upkeep of the website, advertising to competitions, and social media to sponsorship of events. Handling all this are, purely by chance, not one, but two, qualified translators; a philosophy graduate and former pub landlady; a one-time chalet girl; a sociology graduate who now captains the local tennis club; and someone who has been destined to work in a ‘colouring-in department’ ever since winning a Blue Peter badge for a card she designed. When they’re not thinking about pixels, PPC or Pinterest, this eclectic bunch can be found walking the North York Moors armed with The Good Pub Guide, gardening, making chutneys, listening to music, going to festivals, watching cricket, visiting castles, relaxing with a spot of yoga, or getting muddy on Yorkshire’s mountain-bike trails (the steeper, the better, apparently!).

The backgrounds of the Holiday Information & Feedback Team – which is also responsible for writing and updating the vast wealth of route notes, cultural and historical background information which we send out to customers prior to their holiday – are as varied as the post-holiday correspondence they deal with. There’s a former languages teacher who spent a few months as a crew member and cook on a yacht and a separate stint rounding up sheep on horseback in New Zealand; an ex-army officer from the Royal Engineers; a historian who has written a book of castle-themed walks; someone who spent many years overseas teaching English; and a former reservist in the Royal Military Police. Their interests range from gardening, tennis, landscape photography, painting, planning walks for the local rambling club, and cooking (one team member makes a wicked maki-sushi ), to leading outdoor fitness classes and competing in obstacle course races and iron-distance triathlons.

Our Product Managers design, improve and generally ensure the smooth running of our holidays, building good relationships with the hoteliers and other suppliers with whom we work. Two had previous travel-industry experience before joining Inntravel, but the others worked in Somalia for the International Red Cross; as a languages teacher at a secondary school; as an English teacher in Madrid (where she acquired a Spanish husband); and as an office manager in Paris. Besides speaking French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and German, their somewhat diverse skills include operating a field-hospital radio system, playing the flute and delivering calves. At weekends you’ll find them on a badminton court, growing vegetables on their allotment, in the kitchen cooking and baking, at the local arthouse cinema, out on the paths of the Moors and Wolds, or, come winter, skiing.

When they’re not paying invoices, reconciling accounts, processing expense claims, producing month-end reports, or raising money for charity by taking part in 5K runs or abseiling down the Royal Armouries building in Leeds, our cat-loving Accounts Team likes to do pub quizzes, play football, boxercise, relax with needlecrafts, read, and watch films – preferably Bill Murray classics or Star Wars. May the force be with them!