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Intrepid Travel’s big adventure

Last Updated: Tuesday, 15 April 2008

By Amanda Gome

It was tough times that spurred Darrell Wade to change the strategy of Intrepid Travel. The result? $120 million growth in a decade. He tells how he did it, plus reveals bold new plans.

Darrell Wade, 47 (left of picture), cooked up the idea for Intrepid Travel with Geoff Manchester (right) after a bottle of wine around a camp fire in 1989.

The two, who met doing commerce at university, wanted to provide adventure tourism for a middle class that was sick of boring, predictable holidays.

Eighteen years on, with turnover of $130 million, they have 800 employees across 23 companies in the Intrepid Group and operate in 96 countries.

Much of that growth has occurred in the last 10 years. The spur? The company was badly affected by the SARS virus, the Bali bombing and September 11.

So how did the larrikin Wade, who still takes three months holidays a year and never wears a suit, take the company from $10 million to $130 million in a decade?

Amanda Gome caught up with Wade and heard his tips and future plans. He is happy to answer your questions. Email feedback@smartcompany.com.au

Amanda Gome: You started Intrepid almost 20 years ago to service a niche market providing adventure tourism to essentially middle class backpackers, bored with the mainstream. Has the niche changed?

Darrell Wade: No. But the market has got a lot bigger, and we helped to grow it. There are now niches emerging like the trend towards volunteering; paying to go and work in a small community.

After steady growth you suffered a major setback in 2001. What did you do?

We had been growing steadily at 30% to 50%. Then September 11, Bali and SARS hit.

It was very difficult to manage. We had clients cancelling left right and centre, and cash pouring out the door. But we didn’t want to let staff go so we hung on and hoped it would soon be over and that the cash reserves would hold up – which they did.

We were affected for the next two years and realised that we were too exposed only having operations in Asia. We decided to diversify, expand the brand and began working with other companies to do so.

So the idea was to gain more clients and be able to swing resources between Europe and Asia and Australasia. What happened?

We wished we had moved into other countries like Europe earlier. We began to look for partners. We approached GAP Adventures, a Canadian company, that had represented us for years – they sold our Asia product but they didn’t want to (take it to Europe).

Then we ended up acquiring a British company Guerba that gave us immediate entry into new destinations, including in Africa. That was the first acquisition we did.

But GAP was extremely unhappy and they dropped us like a hot potato. So we had a brochure out in three months and became a competitor in South America.

What was the next major step?

Joint ventures. Four years ago we talked to staff in Vietnam and a very smart person said to us ‘you take 7000 people to Vietnam, if that is growing at 40% in 15 years time you will be taking 30,000 yet you are running everything from Australia’.

It was very compelling. So we did a joint venture. We found it much easier to own vehicles and land and set up contracts to have the level of legality we didn’t have previously. There were cost savings using local infrastructure and we realised within months that the benefits were so obvious we should have done this a long time ago.

Where do you have joint ventures?

Cambodia, India, China, Thailand and just done the same in Nepal.

Not only does it give you the ability to scale up at low cost, but says to other players we have the capacity to tailor specific products for you outside of the Intrepid brand.

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