Roche famously quit Travel Republic to help launch website travel.co.uk, alongside business partner Simon Powell, founder of Comtec.
He described the tough decision he had to make to abandon the project before it was completed.
The website is still expected to launch in the near future.
“The rewards and the future [prospects] weren’t as one might have hoped,” Roche told the audience.
Travel.co.uk was intended as an online aggregator and Roche explained some of the problems he encountered along the way.
His business partner was based in Cardiff and he said that the travel to and from London was taking its toll. He also explained the difficulty start-up businesses had in raising money.
Roche said that he came to the conclusion that he was more interested in working for a “customer-facing business” rather than a technology one. “And I realised that just wasn’t for me and I had to walk away,” he said.
Roche has worked for the likes of Tui, Olympic Holidays and Lastminute.com and said that one of the major lessons he had learned in his career was that chasing the experience was much better than chasing the money.
In an overview of his career he talked about the highs – joining, building and selling a business – and the lows: being made redundant and getting sued. “The biggest mistakes I’ve made [in my career] were kneejerk decisions,” he said.
Roche joined Loveholidays.com initially as chief commercial officer before moving to chief operating officer. The company is now the 25th largest Atol-holder, according to the CAA, with a license for just over 167,000 public sales.
