We think that business should be fun & exciting

At ATD Travel Services, Adding Happiness® to people’s holidays is at the heart of everything we do. Whether your perfect holiday experience is skipping down Main Street USA at Walt Disney World, hovering over the New York sights in a luxury chopper, or enjoying a whale watching experience in Iceland, we’re confident that it’s what you do on holiday that will Add Happiness®, rather than the flight, car rental or holiday insurance. Because of this, we’ve been toiling away for over a decade to bring you the best experiences from quality suppliers all over the world.

It all began in 2002, when ATD founder Oliver Brendon asked himself – why aren’t people pre-purchasing their gate-ready Florida attraction tickets online before they arrive, rather than waiting in queues at the parks to buy a ticket or exchange a tour operator voucher? Good question. With a loan of £10,000 from his parents, Olly built a website, found himself a desk and office chair and opened up the phone lines. Long hours, thousands of phone calls and 365 days of solid work ensued! It turns out, the customers were asking themselves the same question all along.

A little while down the line, Olly had put in enough elbow grease that he was able to hire Martin ‘Dicky’ Barton, who has been ‘delivering the dream’ (his words, not ours) as Head of Dispatch at ATD ever since. Even though calls were coming in thicker and faster than Olly and Dicky could handle alone, Olly wanted to expand the business. Help came from Chris Bradshaw, university friend and former manager at TUI, who brought in lots of relevant industry experience and today is Group Marketing Director and part owner of ATD Travel Services. Caroline Leon joined the team shortly after and has since become Head of Reservations (and controller of the radio stations), celebrating her 10th year at ATD last year. In fact, although we’ve expanded a lot over the last few years, today there are eight (soon to be nine!) people from the team in the 10 year club. What they don’t know about our experiences isn’t worth knowing.

By 2005, Olly had won the Young Entrepreneur of the Year award, and the following year the team decided they weren’t content to just be Florida experts anymore; they wanted their customers to be able to explore the world and experience something extraordinary while they were doing it. DoSomethingDifferent.com was launched in 2006 and now sells experiences in nearly 50 countries all over the world. International expansion followed with the launch of the Attraction Tickets Direct brand in Ireland, Germany and Brazil. We’ve also recently expanded into selling theme park hotel packages with the launch of themeparkbeds.com, selecting the finest hotels and comfiest beds after much ‘difficult’ research! We’re always growing and thinking of new ideas to add happiness® to our customers’ holidays.

Today we’ve reached a 130-strong team, most of whom are based at the Clapham HQ, though Olly is keen to keep the small business ethos – not only in our customer service, but in the office too. There’s Friday team lunches, charitable endeavours, sports challenges and even the odd after work drink at our local. We have a great time in the office and out on the road, on familiarisation trips to all our fabulous destinations – riding ALL the big rollercoasters so we can make sure we offer you the best and most up to date information on our experiences. Because after all, our customers’ enjoyment is all that really matters to us.

I suppose all that’s left to do is to introduce you to the team. Or why not join the gang?