Bob Peters’ Journey From Sedbergh School to Globetrotting Travel Entrepreneur

Bob (Lupton House 1984 – 1989, before it became a girl’s House), is a local boy who describes himself as the eldest and the naughtiest of three siblings. He and his brother attended Sedbergh School, while his sister was at Casterton. Whilst not being academically inclined Bob absolutely loved the atmosphere of Sedbergh and the opportunities he had to try everything. He was a keen rugby player and in addition to playing for the first XV he enjoyed target sports and athletics (particularly shot put). Bob’s brother was Head of House and went on to become a very successful commander in the Royal Navy. However, not knowing what he really wanted to do, Bob’s career went in a different direction; he decided to take a gap year that turned into gap years. No stranger to hard work, he worked hard in a lot of odd-jobs before finding his way to University for his first career – restaurant management. Having excelled in his chosen career – he took time away for a break to explore the world and realised his true passion lay in travel. He’s worked in the travel industry for 22 years and launched his own successful business. Bob’s contact details can be found on his business page.

I think that travel is not one of those things you would automatically think, “Oh, I’m going to leave school and I’m going to be a travel agent.” It’s not something that is on the tip of everyone’s tongue. You just wouldn’t normally think that.

My brother and I came to Sedbergh School on a bursary. The reason I mention this is because I hope you will appreciate how lucky, well, not lucky, but how humble I feel to have had a bursary to come to a school like this [Sedbergh]. One of the reasons I’m sat here today having a talk with you is because of the things I learned at Sedbergh which have given me what I would say is a head start in life. There’s no doubt about that.

My mum put me to work from the age of about 12 because we ran a hotel. They needed someone to do all the silver service waiting at night and the meals when the guests came in. So that was what I did. Most of the other kids at Sedbergh would go off and do their summer holidays or in the winter they’d go off skiing with their parents and do all these fantastic things. Mum, myself and my brother all went off to Killington Service Station up upon the M6, and we worked cleaning toilets, cleaning tables, serving tea and coffee. We were incredibly grounded. We didn’t have a huge amount of money.

Lots of my friends were then going off to university after the long, long summer. I thought, well, I’m going to take a gap year because I have no idea what I want to do. So after spending the summer down south, I came back and I got a job as a builder’s assistant. I got to the end of the year and I still didn’t have a clue what I wanted to do. And mum said, well look, you’ve done this building, you seem to enjoy that. And I said, well, you do need a new conservatory, so maybe I go and do building. So off I went to Trent Polytechnic which was part of Nottingham University. I lasted 10 weeks. I hadn’t got a clue about maths; heaven knows why they let me into the course. So I did half a term there and came back with my tail between my legs and thought, well that was a complete waste of time. What am I going to do now?

For the next two, three years I did for some crazy jobs. I traveled around the country. I spent a bit of time working in the Lake district. I worked in pizzerias. I worked in a shampoo factory in South Wales. I traveled a bit, but not extensively because I couldn’t afford to.

So, as I say, I did all these little jobs and then I came across one which I loved. I did it three or four years in a row. It was a seasonal work for the kitchen company Lakeland. They used to do shows all around the country. So, I did this, I absolutely loved it. Through that I met this guy who was a TV chef back then. He’s long gone, but he suggested that because I’d always been passionate about cooking and I loved my food, loved restaurants, and with my family background as well, he said, “Well why don’t you go to Brighton University and do hotel catering / institution management”? Which is exactly what I did.

That was where I really started to take things a bit more seriously; I was 22, 23 when I went there [to Brighton University], which is quite late to go to university. Most people, if they’ve taken a year out, they’ll go at 19 or 20. So, I sort of had a bit of extra maturity. I did two years there and that got me started; it got me on the ladder, so to speak. Eventually I got a job at Harrod’s and I worked there two years. I worked my way up, I started off as a loading server and I worked my way up and after two years I was running one of the restaurants in the food halls. I loved it; it was a great time. I got to meet Princess Diana on numerous occasions – I was serving her cocktails and canapes. I’m very proud to say that I met her. It was incredible.

Anyway, so I did two years there and then I thought, this is it. Restaurants are my thing. After Harrod’s I got a job with a private restaurant company who had six restaurants in London. They were American diner style, but with fresh food. I worked on the Kings Road in Chelsea and I was like, oh, Kings Road, Chelsea, it doesn’t get any better than this! I worked my way up from an assistant manager there to basically running the company within six years. It was hard, hard, hard work but I loved it. Anyone who tells you that going into hotels and restaurants and the hospitality industry, is really good fun and the money is great – they’re completely lying. It is hard work unless you own your own restaurant and are very successful. It’s a great career, but you’ve got to have a passion for it. And as much as I did have a passion for hospitality, it was definitely missing something. I always enjoyed my traveling, but I’d missed out on my year out after school. So I thought, okay, I’m 30 years old, I’m going to take a year out. I spoke to the owner of the company, I said, I’m going to take a year out and I’m going to travel around the world. And he said, great, if you want to come back afterwards then fantastic.

Now the seeds are forming! I’m thinking, I’ve done a tiny bit of traveling but never done anything really big. So, I bought a round the world ticket and off I went and did this sort of classic round the world thing starting in California, then going up to over to Australia and New Zealand. Then I came back and I spent a three, four months in Indonesia. I was in Thailand for Millennium in 1999, which was fantastic. I was there for six weeks, came back and went back into the restaurant and I really struggled. I’d got the bug, the travel bug. I’m sure some of you have done some amazing travels and you can understand how easy it is to get a bug for something like travel because you are just seeing some of the most beautiful places in the world having some of the most amazing experiences.

Although I did go back and work in the restaurants for another year, I then decided to take another four weeks out and do something I’d always wanted to do that was inspired by one of my old geography teachers here at Sedbergh, the one place he’d kept on going on about which he’d spent a bit of time in was the Hindu Kush. The Hindu Kush is part of the three biggest mountain ranges in the world; it’s in northern Pakistan. I went off with a couple of mates. We did a Jeep Safari in Northern Pakistan in September, 2001, and while we were there, we popped over to Afghanistan… can anyone think about what major world events happened in September, 2001? The Twin Towers, 911, happened. …and I was on holiday in Afghanistan. It was one of the most exciting, nerve wracking, tremendous awe inspiring adventure ridden times of my life up there, literally knowing that Bin Laden could be in a cave around the corner. Suffice to say I got back safely, but it was incredible. This whole event was a real rite of passage for me. It was the impetus that I needed to take the next step in my life.

I took a 75% pay cut to leave as Director of Operations for a private restaurant group to start off at a company called Trailfinders. I remember one of my friends who I knew who was working there, he came over to me and said, you’re not cut out for travel mate. He goes, “I’ll give you three months and you’ll be done”. I never looked back. For me, this was the start of my apprenticeship, which turned out to be a 15 year apprenticeship at Trailfinders. I learnt my trade and I did it by traveling. And in that 15 years I knocked off over 90 countries. I’m now at well over a hundred countries visited around the world. So I’ve been to more than half the world. There’s 194 I think countries recognised by the UN and I think I’ve been to about 108 of them. I did most of that in that 15 years at Trailfinders, some of the happiest years of my life. Traveling. learned the trade, about how it works, about how to sell. I was always in higher end sales, so I was always dealing with really quite wealthy and interesting people. I did that up until eight years ago when I took another big decision and that was to stop working for someone else.

I decided to run my own company under a safety net, under a franchise. The company I work with is called Travel Counsellors and I have been success successfully building that business by bringing in fellow travel agents to work with. Covid obviously hit us hard. It hit a lot of industries hard, but particularly travel. You can imagine no one was traveling and if no one travels, it means there’s no money coming in. So that was really tough. However, we bounced back after Covid and I built my team and as of now I’ve got some 8, 9, 10 people working for me and I’m running one of the most successful teams within the industry, certainly within Travel Counsellors. And that’s essentially where I am now.

My wife and I, are hoping to move this year to France. My wife has taken early retirement and while I love what I do and I love the business, I will also be looking to take my foot off the gas. What I want to do is find that balance between working hard – because you do need to work hard if you’re going to be successful in life, there’s no doubt about that – but also, it’s so important, you have to enjoy what you do. For me, travel is not a job, it’s a hobby. It’s something that I happen to be good at doing, good at selling, good at organising, I love working in a team and building that team. And again, team building is something that came from Sedbergh. I’ve always been good at working in teams. You guys have taught that from a very early age. At Sedbergh, it’s all about the team, not the individual.

So, with regards to what I actually do, I have a portfolio of about 800 clients, some very well-known clients, some celebrities. I look after a lot of singers, a lot of comedians. This is one of the key things, all the experience of all the traveling – that’s what will get you into this industry. If you are really well traveled, then it could be a serious career for you, but if you haven’t really been to many places, then you’re going to struggle because knowledge is power in the travel industry. It counts for everything.

It is an industry you certainly need to be passionate about. It’s not one that you would walk into thinking, yeah, I quite like traveling. I like nice hotels, so I’m going to be a good fit. I think the other important thing is the confidence to communicate well with people; there’s no sitting back and texting and WhatsApping and emailing. I say to all my team, do not hide behind email, pick up the phone, communicate. Talking to clients is what gets me in business. I think I make more sales than the other person because I pick up the phone and talk to the client. Having the confidence to talk to people, that’ll get you a long, long way. Not just in travel, but in life.

Given my time again, I think the fact that I basically had four years of gap years before I went to uni stood me in good stead. Very few people, I think, really know what they want to do at that age. So, I think purely for getting experience, absolutely, I think a gap year is a great idea. But you’ve got to work. It’s not just all fun. I mean, I think the work ethos is ingrained in me; I’ve never not done a day’s hard work, and so you’ve got to be prepared to put the work in. And also don’t be scared about taking time out between jobs in your late mid twenties, early thirties. Take sabbaticals. Take secondments more for your mental health than anything. Everyone needs time off and actually most decent employers now, they will make provisions for you to have time off because as we know, mental health is a massive, massive thing.

So salaries, it’s not the best paid job in the world. If you go in for someone like Trailfinders you’d probably go in starting off at £25k a year, their management team start at around £50k – £60k. Senior management probably up to a £100k. The other area you could look at, if you’ve got some experience, you could go into the more high-end concierge style of travel. Especially in London, there’s a lot of small high-end concierge style companies. There you will be dealing with quarter of a million pound trips, having to organise expeditions. It’s not just you going into your high street travel agent and sitting down at a desk. You’ve also got all different aspects of it. Some people specialise in adventure, travel, cruising. Within the next few years there’s going to be people specialising in space travel. I mean, there’s lots of different areas that people can get into.

In conclusion, my journey from Sedbergh School to a successful career in the travel industry has been a winding and adventurous path. Reflecting on my journey, I emphasise the importance of being well-travelled and passionate about the travel industry. Communication skills and the confidence to connect with people are essential in this field, emphasising the value of personal interactions over digital communication. While salaries may not be the highest, the diverse opportunities within the industry, from high-end concierge services to space travel, offer unique and rewarding career paths.

As I look back, I encourage young individuals to consider taking gap years for valuable experiences and emphasise the significance of mental health breaks throughout one’s career. In the end, my story underscores the idea that success in the travel industry, like any other, requires dedication, passion, and a willingness to embark on new adventures.

To learn more about Bob’s business please visit – https://www.travelcounsellors.co.uk/bob.peters/