Still serving at 70: the travel veterans who won't quit the industry they love

Despite turning 77 last month, Imp Travel founder Paul Brewer isn’t ready to hang up his boots quite yet.

Brewer, who started the Lincoln-based agency in 1983, received The Travel Network Group’s Lifetime Achievement Award at the consortium’s conference in Munich earlier this month.

It’s a far cry from his first job in the industry – and having to go through six months’ worth of training before he could serve customers. 

A council worker with a passion for travel – Brewer would organise trips for local government officers to Paris and Amsterdam through his local agency Ellerman Travel – which he later took a pay cut to join. “I remember snapping the manager’s hand off when he offered me the job – it was a no-brainer,” he tells TTG.

During his time with the agency, he remembers his old manager’s somewhat dubious approach to Travel Trade Gazette. “He was worried we’d look for new jobs in the ads section – so he would throw the magazine in the bin,” recalls Brewer. “When he’d go out of the shop, we’d get them out and read them cover to cover.”

After managing Ellerman’s Scunthorpe and Lincoln branches, Brewer became an area manager before striking out on his own.

Organising tours to all corners of the world became his forte, from a decades-long relationship with the German wine town of Neustadt an der Weinstrasse (one year Imp Travel took three coaches full of customers) to venturing further afield with trips to Peru and the Galapagos, China, Borneo, India and Brewer's favourite destination, South Africa.

Although mainly working from home these days, Brewer still takes great interest and pride in mentoring his son, agency managing director Mark.

“I haven’t said to myself ‘I’m going to finish next year, or the year after that'. At the moment I have no intention of putting my feet up entirely,” Brewer says, adding that he is keen to finish his long-haul adventures with a final visit to South Africa near the end of 2025.

“I’ll still be involved after that. I won’t totally retire – it keeps the brain cells going!”

Paul Brewer, Imp Travel

When Roddie MacPhee joined Barrhead Travel’s board in 2011, he didn’t imagine he would help to oversee a 20-store expansion plan nearly 10 years later.

MacPhee, 81, celebrated 60 years in travel in 2021, starting his career at Dundee-based Scotts Travel’s in 1961, where he worked for three years. Selling travel in the 1960s was very different, he tells TTG, when unmarried couples sharing a room was taboo. But he got round this, he laughs – with a curtain!

“Selling single rooms was impossible, so someone had the idea of a twin room with a curtain between beds – that was fine with their families!” he says incredulously. “It seems difficult to believe this was a conversation I had to have with parents!”

MacPhee spent seven years at British European Airways – now BA – as a reservations agent, but returned to retail, for 18 years, at Ayrshire-based AT Mays, which was eventually sold to Thomas Cook.

He moved from regional director to marketing director, and AT Mays went from 20 branches in Scotland to hundreds of locations in the UK. It was a “tough” time with intense competition – notably from Lunn Poly and Pickfords, MacPhee says, nodding to one year when discount levels changed four times in one day just to keep up.

A “chance conversation” tempted MacPhee to Barrhead. “I wanted to take it easier – but it didn’t turn out that way,” he laughs. His principal role is working on Barrhead projects centred around property and facilities management.

Stand-outs in his career include his Scottish Passenger Agents’ Association presidency in 1993, “a highlight of any career,” he stresses. He is currently Scotland’s representative on Abta’s Council of Regions.

MacPhee is adamant the travel industry is a remarkable career choice and adds that product quality is now “mindblowing”.

“There was no such thing as a cruise holiday. There were scheduled shippings and people would join those to get to their holiday. Now the world of cruise is exploding.”

Asked what he would tell his teenage self, MacPhee says: “Always listen carefully, to learn as much as possible, to your colleagues and customers.”

Roddie MacPhee, Barrhead Travel