Bonus: How we turned start-up Heidi into one of the biggest ski holiday firms

This is Money Podcast

This is Money

Business News, News, Investing, Business

4.4 • 734 Ratings

🗓️ 19 February 2026

⏱️ 37 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this bonus This is Money podcast episode, Simon Lambert interviews Marcus and Alexander Blunt, the brothers behind travel firm Heidi, to find out how they turned a start-up into the UK's second biggest ski package holiday firm in eight years - and survived the pandemic's threat to the business along the way.

Eight years ago, brothers Marcus and Alexander Blunt were passionate skiers frustrated by the difficulty of trying to organise the mountain holidays that they and their friends really wanted.

Deciding on a ski resort, sorting flights, accommodation, transfers and getting friends from different parts of the country to the right place at the right time, had Marcus building complicated spreadsheets to work things out.

After one mammoth piece or organisation, they had a lightbulb moment. Maybe it was time for a package holiday firm that allowed people to tailor their ski trips to what they needed, find the best place to go to and put customer service centre stage.

With both the brothers working in the travel industry, they decided to figure out how to test their concept and the appetite for it and then launched their start-up in 2018, while doing full-time jobs - and both having babies born that year.

They made a pact that if they could do £500,000 worth of sales in their first year, they would quit their jobs and go all-in, explains Alexander.

From there, in the space of less than eight years Heidi has grown to become the UK's second biggest package holiday firm. That's no mean feat considering that the pandemic hit just two years in - and halfway through the ski holiday season.

Marcus and Alexander tell Simon how they turned their business idea into reality, how they grew Heidi, the lessons they have learnt along the way and share their tips for other aspiring entrepreneurs.

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Hosts: Georgie Frost, Simon Lambert, Lee Boyce, Helen Crane

Producer: Georgie Frost

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to This Is Money podcast. I'm Simon Lambert and you're listening to a special bonus episode of the podcast, where I'm joined by Alexander and Marcus Blunt, the brothers behind the ski package holiday Heidi.
0:18.1	Now, you may have been watching the Winter Olympics on the television. You may have been
0:22.0	looking at those snow-covered mountains and those blue skies and thinking that it sounds and looks
0:27.5	quite a lot better than grey and rainy Britain. I know I have, but regular lists to the
0:33.7	podcast will know that it doesn't take much to get me thinking about going snowboarding.
0:43.7	However, if some of those people do decide to go away, there's a fair chance that some of them will be going with Heidi.
0:51.3	Because Alexander and Marcus have built what is Britain's second biggest ski package holiday firm,
0:53.6	and it was only founded in 2018. So, seeing as Winter Olympics were on,
0:56.6	we thought it would be a good time to speak to them and find out a little bit more about how
1:00.0	they built the business, how they turn their idea into reality, and what they learned
1:04.5	along the way. Welcome to the podcast, both of you. Thank you very much for joining us.
1:09.9	Marcus, first, why don't you tell us
1:11.8	about the idea behind Heidi? How did it come about? Yeah, hi, Simon. Thank you. It's something
1:18.0	which I think has been niggling away both of us for a long time. I think, you see, we've always
1:22.8	been mad about what we do. We grew up in the north of Scotland in a little cottage on a snowy
1:29.8	hillside. Well, it was not snowy all the time, but snowy a fair chunk of the time. And with a Norwegian
1:34.6	mum who is sort of proudly Norwegian and passionate about all things being outside in the snow.
1:40.4	And so we've always been sort of kind of obsessed sort of skiing and snow since an early age.
1:46.0	And I think that was only sort of cemented when we moved to Norway's teenagers and got to sort of ski loads there.
1:50.6	And it just became sort of part of life.
1:52.7	And then we sort of moved back to the UK and started work and started sort of organizing our own ski trips.
1:59.4	Having come from a place where it was so easy, you know, living in Norway, you could just get on the bus and go skiing at your local slope, for example, to then it being this sort of enormous logistical challenge to solve, became, on one side kind of frustrating, on the second side, kind of enjoyable for me, because I'm a total nerd, but we ended up sort of pouring loads of energy and trying to figure out what the right trip for us was. You see, we were busy with kids, jobs, we couldn't go away for a week, you know, the typical sort of Saturday, Saturday holiday that the market was offering. So we happened to doing it, doing ourselves. And so this is one holiday in particular where my spreadsheet was excellent, but also kind of out of control. And sort of dawned on me that it was completely ridiculous that there wasn't technology that existed in order to make this super easy.
	...

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