Actually the holiday industry as a whole is not in bad shape according to Mottershead, and he ought to know. In the late 90s as Managing Director he grew Airtours into the UK's largest holiday company and then turned its North American business round from a $35 million loss to the same level of profit. In fact he has been responsible for much of its success over the last decade.

As managing director of TUI UK between 2001 and 2004 with responsibility for Thomson Holidays, Lunn Poly, Travelhouse and other UK-based businesses he steered the company through one of the most difficult periods for travel (following 9/11) and still achieved record profits, taking Thomson Holidays back to the number one position by transforming. The travel industry may be having its problems, but it gets stronger every year. "It has grown every year as long as I can remember. The volume of traffic in and out of the UK continues to grow. We are in a positive market. This is not an industry in decline!" he insists.

He is a man who has never shirked a challenge, so it isn't hard to see why, rather than continue to work in companies with whose drawbacks he was only too familiar, he took the entrepreneurial route and decided to create a new business tailor made for the investors he needed to back it. The big players on the high street had a record that made the City nervous, he concluded, having looked at the existing business models in the sector. In Travelzest he set out to create a business that avoided the negatives and would therefore attract investors and customers equally.

A model for our times
Mottershead saw an opportunity to develop from scratch a model that had been difficult to achieve in the old-style travel groups. "Having taken Airtours to the UK number one position in the 1990s, and more recently having taken Thomson back to the number one position, I have seen the industry from the top," he explains.

"That's what gave me the ability to create this new vision. If I hadn't been able to bring that experience, funding it would have been a problem. There are not that many listed travel business: it is a difficult area for people to invest in because it has been asset intensive and because most of the revenue has been generated in the traditional holiday season. People didn't like the fact that all the profit was dependent on performance from July to September. They didn't like the fact that huge levels of guarantees are paid in advance; that these companies owned retail stores, and that it was a high turnover, low margin business."

Travelzest is a lean business. It has no high street presence and is designed to capture business throughout the year. "We have established a travel business where hopefully people can't point to those old pitfalls, and I think that is why it has caught people's imagination," he says.

It certainly seems to have done that. The year to October 31 2006 saw acquisition-driven growth of 70 percent in turnover, to £19.2 million and more than £400,000 pre-tax profit. But Chris Mottershead views 2006 as work still in progress. "Our brokers suggest that 2007 will reflect the true level of the group more appropriately, with EBITDA of around £4.6 million on a turnover in the region of £36 million. That of course is not taking into consideration any further acquisitions we may make."

So Travelzest has grown by attraction rather than by going out hunting, he says: "Our model is quite straightforward. Nobody can run one of our businesses if they have not sold out completely and taken shares in the group. All our MDs are either shareholders or have share options, so they are trying to grow shareholder value." It is vital, he believes, to guard the entrepreneurial spirit that created the group companies in the first place. No attempt is made to consolidate the businesses.

Focused companies
The first company in the group, a France specialist called VFB, which had pioneered the idea of independent holidays in France and added the word 'g