May 8th - "We wanted to call the company Pathfinders"
Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast
The Independent
3.6 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 8 May 2025
⏱️ 5 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Day four of my conversation with Trailfinders founder and chairman Sir Mike Gooley, in which he reveals how the company name was chosen; why booking online isn't always brilliant; and how the firm very briefly owned a light aircraft.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | We searched for name and we came out our pathfinders and being military we were rather like that. |
| 0:05.1 | Of course we discovered that pathfinders had been, you know, registered all over the place. |
| 0:09.4 | So we thought we'd just change it slightly and came up with trail funders. |
| 0:13.3 | Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder. |
| 0:18.9 | It's Thursday the 8th of May and that was the voice as you may |
| 0:23.6 | by now have recognised Officer Mike Gulley. I'm talking to him all this week about Trailfinders, |
| 0:31.3 | the company that he founded and for which he is still chairman 55 years on. We've been talking today about why anybody should |
| 0:42.5 | bother to use a travel agent when actually we're all travel agents thanks to the wonders of the |
| 0:49.2 | internet. You all remember it Simon, the person who coined things to be your own travel agent and be on your own online booking. |
| 0:57.6 | It's all fine until something goes wrong. |
| 1:00.6 | And this is something I say sort of fairly guardedly because obviously you want to portray travel as being riddled with threats of this, that and that, but I'm afraid that is the case. It's |
| 1:11.5 | earthquake and it's civil unrest, it's diseases, it's everything you can bloody name. |
| 1:16.3 | Airline strikes from time to dime, snowbound, fogbound. You book it yourself. And especially if it's |
| 1:23.2 | got multiple legs. And one thing goes wrong. It could even be a bloody schedule change because |
| 1:28.1 | sometimes the schedule change is two days and that means all your linking flights all have to be |
| 1:33.3 | re-booked and some of them may have conditions on them. It's a lot of work. An agent, because that's |
| 1:38.8 | what they're doing all day long and they've got all the tools, all the apps and so on, |
| 1:43.8 | which we've written ourselves, |
| 1:45.4 | you know, they can do it very quickly. They can also, when the wheels come off, |
| 1:50.0 | rebuild it very quickly. So that I think is one of the single reasons not to be your own travel |
| 1:55.0 | agent. Can I just ask about the name? We have all sorts of names in travel, Ryanair, Tooie. |
| 2:02.6 | How did you come up with trailfinders and how's it? My flat, which was then a garden basement flat, narrative gardens, and the three of us, |
... |
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