Oasis Travel, Holywood

This is a small village with a community feel, and whether Oasis Travel is staging an Easter egg hunt, showing off its Christmas windows or networking in the Holywood Chamber of Commerce, you can count on the team to be in the thick of it. And even if they’re enjoying a day off themselves like May Day, they still offer the shop driveway for parking and their wheelie bins for rubbish collection.

Word of mouth recommendations help this agency thrive in a place where others have come failed. There’s good faith in the town to support local businesses, and in particular a team that makes the effort to get to know its customers, whatever their age. Primary school children are invited into the store to find out what being a travel agent entails and elderly clients feel at ease coming in for a cup of tea and a chat.

Brochures fly off the shelves on a Saturday but the team doesn’t rest on its laurels, treating their regular and new customers with a series of events. Recent examples include a dinner in a Chinese restaurant to whet clients’ appetites for a Wendy Wu tour, and a wine themed event, for a taste of the Kirker Holidays experience.

Holywood’s six staff are a mix of youth and experience, managed by manager Lisa Sprake. They work as a tight unit to deliver the sort of profit growth year-on-year that would be worthy of a much larger store. Sprake herself has realized her ambition to build up the cruise side of the business, and former manager Simon Thomas O’Neill has diversified to manage the Portfolio business, which notched up £1 million in sales last year. He makes appointments to suit the client, and treats them to a coffee or something stronger. And who would fail to be inspired by the Mark Twain quote scripted on the Portfolio wall…’Explore. Dream. Discover.’

• oasis-travel.co.uk