Welcome
If you’ve arrived here looking for Travelman, you’re in the right place.
I’ve spent most of my life travelling the world, first with a backpack and later building two award-winning travel companies. Somewhere along the way, I realised that the greatest journeys are not always the ones marked on a map.
Travelman is the story of how a London lad with more curiosity than common sense turned a love of travel into a career, and why the lessons learned on the road proved just as valuable in business as they did in life.
I hope you’ll click through to my website – travelman.nz – that’s where you’ll find the full story, along with photographs and news about the launch.
A few lessons learned along the way.
Life has a habit of teaching us lessons when we least expect them. Some are amusing, like discovering why bearing your passport in the sand on a beach in the south of France is a terrible idea. Others are more serious, including the moment I learned that writing a shareholders’ agreement on the back of a beer mat is unlikely to end well.
The adventures, the mistakes and the people I met along the way shaped both my travels and my business life. They also make for some memorable stories.
Where it all began
My father, Walter Bridge, was one of Britain’s early travel industry pioneers. In 1949, he founded a Swiss travel service, making overseas holidays possible for ordinary families after the Second World War.
He was also the person who encouraged me to buy my first backpack and hitchhike around Europe at the age of 16. Looking back, it seems extraordinary. At the time it felt perfectly normal, and it sparked a lifelong curiosity about the world that has never left me.
If you’d like to learn more about Walter’s remarkable life, you can find his story and archive film here.
From backpacker to travel entrepreneur
University gave me a degree, but travelling gave me an education.
After graduating, I set off on a 22-month overland journey to Australia without a mobile phone, a guidebook or a credit card. The trip included driving 24,000km around Australia in an ageing Holden station wagon, taking whatever work I could find to pay for food and fuel.
Those experiences eventually led me into the travel industry, where I founded Bridge the World and later Bridge and Wickers. Both businesses grew from a simple belief that great travel changes people.
If you’re interested in how those companies were built, you’ll find more about them here. If you’d rather hear the stories from the road, head over to travelman.nz
Travel and business
People often ask me where they should travel next or how they should approach building a business. After more than 30 years in the travel industry, and a lifetime spent exploring the world, I’m always happy to point people in the right direction. If you’re planning an adventure, starting a business or thinking about selling one, feel free to get in touch.
