Craven’s return ticket with travel firm WST

A SMALL business led by the founder of educational travel company NST Holdings , is reporting soaring growth.

David Craven built up and sold Blackpool-based NST for £47.2m to Holidaybreak in 2007.

After leaving Holidaybreak he returned to the travel sector in late 2010, acquiring Wirral Schools Travel (WST), which has since been moved to Blackpool.

Mr Craven said WST has had an outstanding year’s trading and is on
track for “another phenomenal year” with bookings up 100% year-on-year. Sales in the first year were £500,000 and are expected to have soared ten-fold to £5m by the end of 2013.

Chairman Mr Craven has assembled a highly-experienced team – with a number of former  NST colleagues joining the new venture, including Deborah Beckett, a former executive with tour operator MyTravel as well as Holidaybreak.

She said: “We believed that as a result of the consolidation in the educational travel market over the last few years there was an opportunity for a highly experienced and specialist team to deliver an educational experience totally geared to the specific needs of each school or college.

“WST was an ideal business for us to purchase in order to capitalise on that opportunity.”

Since buying WST staff numbers have increased from five to 23. The company organises tours ranging from taking primary school pupils to see Roman ruins, drama students to Stratford to see Shakespeare and even business studies students to Wall Street.
 
Mr Craven said: “The key to our success is having an  experienced, dedicated and committed team which is  totally focused on  delivering high quality  educational travel experiences backed up by the very highest levels of personal service. If we get that right, everything else will follow. ”