Holiday Architects

Sector: Hospitality & leisure

Holiday Architects (the trading name of A&D Holidays Ltd) is an award-winning, high-growth, successful tour operator offering UK holiday makers tailor-made travel adventures across the globe.

The company was founded by Andy and Damien in 2010 who combined their knowledge about luxury travel sales and service with their digital marketing expertise. Starting in a spare bedroom with minimal overheads, they honed their ability in paid digital search, and quickly started to outperform much larger competitors.

As they grew, their workforce grew with it. Their flexible, progressive workplace culture has helped to attract the right talent. In 2018, they relocated (for the third time) to larger premises at Eagle Tower, one of the most prestigious office blocks overlooking Regency Cheltenham.

Holiday Architects’ ‘best-in-class digital advertising combined with best-in-class staff’ business model hasn’t gone unnoticed. They are finalists of 2019 British Travel Awards for the ‘Best Luxury Travel Company’ category. The British Travel Awards are considered the benchmark for excellence when it comes to finding out who really is the best in the travel industry. Last year more than 750,000 votes were cast by the travelling public to determine the 2018 Award winners.

It doesn’t stop there. Holiday Architects won, for the second year in a row, the Wanderlust Magazine Readers Travel Award for Top Tour Operator (with a 100% satisfaction rating) and last year they were runners-up in the SME National Business Awards 2018 ‘High Growth’ category. In the same year they won the ‘Best Place to Work’ in the prestigious Gloucestershire Business Awards.

Today this rapidly growing business employs close to 30 people (and this number will soon rise as they add new holiday destinations to their portfolio) from its Cheltenham base, and has recently added new holiday destinations to its portfolio to include Borneo/Malaysia, Chile, California and New Zealand.

Willans has been advising Holiday Architects on the legal considerations for this rapidly growing business which aims to keep increasing its market share and attract top quality talent. The team at Willans, our employment lawyers in particular, have taken the time to get to know this company, their objectives and work as an extension of their management team. Our employment lawyers applied outside the box thinking to implement unconventional flexible working policies to complement Holiday Architects’ award-winning business model, and more recently, our commercial lawyers helped with its GDPR considerations, which included advice on how to handle the transfer of personal information across different continents.