Peakes Travel Elite, Shrewsbury
With a combined experience of 157 years in travel, the Peakes Travel Elite team of six boasts a wealth of knowledge and skills between them. But it is not just the family-run agency’s staff that is long-serving: the timber-beamed building that houses the business dates back to 1450 and is quite a talking point with customers.
The company was founded by Frances Peake, with her husband Russell in 1988 and local competition is fierce, with eight other travel agencies catering to the local market town’s population of some 72,000 people.
The agency has therefore not rested on its laurels, and has striven to bring in new customers as well as relying on its hugely loyal customer base.
Peakes Travel Elite regularly shares its travel expertise in the local papers and lifestyle magazines, writing travelogue-style features about recent trips and answering readers’ travel questions.
Enlisting the services of a PR consultant a few years ago also translated into lots of new business.
The creation of a new position at Peakes – that of concierge, which launched in December – has helped cement its status as a bastion of good customer service. The agency’s customers now benefit from a staff member dedicated to helping them with any queries or extras post-sale, such as booking airline seats and ancillaries and arranging visas.
But it is the pervasive company ethos of going the extra mile for each and every customer that keeps them coming back again and again: from helping arrange every aspect of an itinerary for a family whose son has epilepsy and autism, to tracking down (and arranging travel to) a war memorial in Kenya for a family that wanted to pay their respects to a long-lost relative.
"Our policy is to make it personal," Peake explains. "To find out what really makes the customer tick. We want to convey a message of trust and longevity."
Place of registration: England and Wales.
Company number 08723341.
Registered address: 6th Floor, 2 London Wall Place, London EC2Y 5AU
