Edinburgh-based couple Isobel and Mark McCardie have been steadily building their travel business since 2017. From the birth of their business idea on a balcony in Bangkok to booking clients while in their seaside caravan, it’s suited them to go at their own pace.
But now they are ready to take their agency business to the next level, by revamping their website, taking on more staff, relocating from home to high street, and scoring an exclusive travel partnership with a leading wellness expert.
Isobel and Mark, owners of Not Just Travel franchisee Rock My World, first met 17 years ago through a mutual friend. A mutual passion for travelling helped ignite their spark – their first big trip together was a six-week tour of Asia. Mark took a sabbatical from his job at Visit Scotland and Isobel, a digital designer, could work from anywhere.
Then in 2014, Mark was offered an opportunity to work as a marketing manager in Thailand for a fast-growing destination management company, and they moved to Bangkok for three years: “It was really interesting to see behind the curtain of travel [with a DMC],” he says.
Inspired to do it better
It was the frustrations the couple experienced while planning their honeymoon in 2016, that led them to believe “we can do this better”.
“We got really generic responses, that made us feel like a commodity,” Mark explains.
Isobel had long enjoyed the benefits of remote, flexible working, and Mark was easily persuaded they should work for themselves, and so, sitting in an egg chair on the balcony of their apartment in Bangkok, a new business idea was mapped out.
“We first came up with Rock My Moon as a name,” recalls Isobel, “but we quickly realised doing honeymoons only was going to be far too narrow.”
Mark and Isobel in Naples: they were drawn together by their mutual love of travelling
As they lacked travel retail experience, they joined Not Just Travel, swayed by its support of new-to-travel agents and the freedom they’d have to promote their own brand, Rock My World.
“It took off really quickly,” says Isobel. “At the beginning we spent no money on marketing, we put all our budget into what we were doing for the clients, treating them like VIPs. We were really clear it was going to be concierge-style service.”
The personal touch
Isobel and Mark gave clients lounge passes, made activity packs for children to take on planes, and sent welcome home chocolates. “We know there’s lots of agents doing this now but we were doing this stuff way before anyone else was doing it,” declares Isobel. “We’ll send journals to clients doing multi-stopovers, personalised letters from Santa for children heading to Lapland, Disney T-shirts to families who’ve booked Disneyland Paris – just really thoughtful things that are relevant to the holiday.”
“These become the talking points that make word-of-mouth recommendations so easy,” she adds.
This VIP service, combined with flexible appointments that suit the customer, has helped them build their business on referrals and recommendations. They now have one full-time and one part-time staff member helping with the concierge service, and they’re looking to add more staff this year.
“In this AI era, we think personal connections will become even more valuable,” explains Mark. “We want AI to help us be as efficient as we can with more repetitive tasks, so we can spend more time chatting to customers.”
Isobel does most of the sales, and once booked, the concierge-style service takes over, leading all the way up to the departure date. “Even when they get on holiday, we send the clients a WhatsApp to check everything is ok, so we can pick things up really quickly if there is anything wrong, rather than waiting until the end of the holiday,” she says.
“Sometimes it feels like we’re on holiday with the clients – they’re sending us pics every day! When you see that joy people are having, it makes the long hours worthwhile, and we really love that.”
Targeting affluent families
Rock My World’s core market is “middle-class Edinburgh families, with kids at private schools”, booking a “life-cycle of holidays”, from skiing and Jet2 packages to tailor-made trips. “They love to chat at the school gates.”
While Isobel and Mark find it easiest to sell the places they’ve been to personally, they also benefit from the influence that television viewing has on travel inspiration.
The recent BBC series of Celebrity Race Across the World, filmed across Central America, has been inspiring families to request Belize, Guatemala and Costa Rica.
Families are becoming more adventurous, but they don’t want to do it on their own, especially if they’re crossing borders, the couple explain.
The majority of their clients live in Scotland, but they also have some in Asia, and as word-of-mouth spreads, other clusters are forming including in the south of England.
“We’re just at the tail end of rebranding and repositioning, and we’re starting to proactively market to a more luxury type of customer. But we’ll always target referrals – the conversion rate is much higher, which is much more powerful than constantly trying to find new customers,” Mark says.
A new partnership in the works
They learnt early on to define their roles, so that Isobel concentrated on the sales side of things and Mark took on everything else, under the managing director role.
The duo work from home, and start every day with a dog walk to brainstorm business ideas. But against the backdrop of AI, they think shop premises could become a valuable asset, offering a personal space to meet clients face-to-face.
'We mosey along fine together working from home – but I'm quite loud on the phone so we are in separate rooms,' reveals Isobel
“There’s a couple of areas we’ve identified [where we’d like to be] but Edinburgh’s not a cheap place. We’re waiting for a few things to fall into place – we need an additional sales person first and the shop will follow,” Mark explains.
An upcoming collaboration will see Mark and Isobel working with nutritionist and broadcaster Amanda Hamilton – who they first met through a community of wild swimmers. The idea is that Amanda will run exclusive global retreats for Rock My World, as well as endorsing wellness products they can sell.
“Amanda will experience things we’ve arranged for her, and if something meets her criteria, she’ll give it her stamp of approval. She’s got a huge following, and she’ll put us out to her network, which includes a lot of potential high-net-worth clients,” says Isobel.
With so many jumping on the wellness bandwagon, Amanda’s criteria will be an important validation to help clients feel confident in what they are booking, adds Mark: “We’re in the final stages of confirming the finer details but it’s going to be an exciting partnership and we’ve lots of ideas we want to develop with her.”
Powering forward
The couple have also been working on a new “cinematic, visual and immersive” website, with business development consultancy Minty Highway, one that steers clear of generic travel content and reflects their personality “so people understand who we are”.
Working with an SEO company, they’ve already seen an increase in enquiries, even though only the landing page of the new website is currently live.
Isobel says: “We're nine years in May and we still absolutely love it. We've still got so much energy and enthusiasm for it, and lots of ideas how we want to grow it.”
When they need to escape, they head to their luxury caravan, close to the sea. “Although we do work from there… it’s never a holiday!”
Right now, they’re still in the building phase and they’re happy to put the hard graft in.
“We’ve probably done it a lot slower than some agents who’ve had rapid growth in Not Just Travel,” explains Isobel. “We had family stuff going on, and we wanted to stay steady, not get into debt.
“But now we’ve got to start motoring again and get more employees. Otherwise, we’ll constantly be doing it ourselves, and not get to that perfect work-life balance stage.”
