G Adventures UK purchase

SMALL group adventure travel company G Adventures has announced the acquisition of the UK-based youth travel operator, TruTravels.

The company was co-founded in 2012 by entrepreneurs Joe Fallon and Mark Pope, both of whom will continue to run TruTravels as minority shareholders.

The purchase was undertaken to strengthen G Adventures’ reach in the youth travel space, and follows a spate of British purchases last year including Travelsphere, Just You, and Swan.

Commenting on the acquisition of TruTravels, G Adventures Founder Bruce Poon Tip said the decision was also motivated by the pursuit of a new “grassroots style of small group travel” catering for younger people.

“When I started digging deeper into what TruTravels does, I discovered that while their ethos is closely aligned to ours, the way they communicate, and how they travel, is so different to G Adventures,” he said.

“For this reason, we don’t want to change what TruTravels does. Joe and Mark are doing an incredible job in this space with this new style of fun-focussed travel which is rooted in meeting new people and driven by social media influences,” Tip added.

TruTravels’ Mark Pope said the company’s similarity in culture was an important selling point in accepting the takeover.

“While it’s obviously exciting to be partnering with the most established and experienced operator in our space, the most important thing for us in saying yes was that we were culturally aligned,” he said.

TruTravels is comprised of 25 staff in England and 40 tour guides in Asia, with the purchase to fuel sales team recruitment and agency distribution growth.