Exodus Travels Brand Guidelines: The 1974 London Overlander Renamed Exodus Adventure Travels

Two overlanders and an office on Earls Court Road.

Exodus began in London on 4 February 1974 as Exodus Expeditions, the company says. Its history page names the founders as John Gillies, a philosophy graduate, and David Burlinson, an engineer, who were part of the overland travel scene of the early 1970s. When the companies they worked for faced closure in 1973, the company says, the two agreed to start their own overland business. Exodus ran it from an office on Earls Court Road, and its first commercial trip, that summer, went to Afghanistan and the Minaret of Jam. TTG, the British travel trade title, reported in September 2023 that the first Exodus trip took a group to Afghanistan in the back of a Bedford truck.

The company says 1975 brought its first trans-continental departure, a ten-week journey from London to Kathmandu in a Bedford truck. Contacts with travel agents in Australia and New Zealand let it sell the return, westbound leg of those Trans-Asia journeys, and that, it says, is when it began to turn a profit. Overland routes into Africa and South America followed, along with shorter trekking and safari trips by air in the Himalayas and in Africa.

Its own account of those decades describes multi-week camping journeys with rough schedules and limited budgets, made possible by the open borders of the 1970s and 1980s. The routes it lists include a 39-week journey from London to Bali through India, China, Thailand and Singapore, trans-Africa trips across the Sahara to Nairobi or Cape Town, and South American overland trips that usually ended in Rio for the February carnival. The company notes that most of those trans-continental routes can no longer be driven.

From expedition to adventure.

Exodus quotes a brochure of 1977 to explain its early style. “Exodus is an Expedition company,” it began, and it set the slow, demanding journeys it offered against the fast coach, the comfortable hotel and the carefully planned itinerary. The mark of a package tour, the brochure said, is that the unexpected never happens, while on an expedition “it never stops happening.” It explained why Exodus used trucks rather than coaches and camped rather than staying in hotels, and said that being an expedition person depends less on age than on the urge to explore.

The range then broadened. The company says it built up walking and trekking trips in the Himalayas, Patagonia, the Atlas Mountains and Central Asia, introduced cycling holidays in the early 1990s, and added specialist programmes in the 2000s, with small-group trips to places such as Mongolia and Madagascar. It now sorts its trips into four travel styles by the overall experience and the typical accommodation, from rugged, back-to-basics trips using simple lodging to slower, more immersive trips using premium hotels, and it gives each itinerary a difficulty rating. It describes groups of typically 10 to 12 travellers, with a usual maximum of about 16, led by local guides.

Exodus belongs to a larger group. The company says it is part of the Adventure division of Travelopia, a group of experiential travel brands. TTG reported on 13 February 2017 that TUI Group’s executive board had agreed to sell Travelopia, its specialist brands division, to the private equity firm KKR, and on 15 June 2017 that the sale had been completed. TUI had announced its intention to sell the division in May 2016, the title said.

Design and documentation.

Escorted and adventure tour operators sell a trip rather than a single product: a fixed route, a group of strangers travelling together and a guide who stays with them. Some build that around coaches and hotels on long touring circuits; others around small groups on trails, local buses and homestays. The operators in this guide sit at different points along that range, and their brands are built to signal which kind of trip a traveller is booking.

Group size and the guide are central to how these companies describe themselves. Intrepid Travel says its groups are usually 12 to 14 people with a local leader, while G Adventures sorts its departures into named travel styles, from Classic to Local Living and trips for travellers aged 18 to 39. These style names do the work that a range name does for a manufacturer: they let a catalogue of hundreds of itineraries be read at a glance.

Brochure and website naming in this sector tends to be plain and descriptive. Trips are usually titled by region, route or length, and the brand voice lives in the surrounding copy and in the names of collections, partnerships and community programmes. Some operators also run foundations or work with non-profit partners whose names appear beside the trips; Intrepid has The Intrepid Foundation, and G Adventures works with the Planeterra Foundation.

The corporate pages tell a second story, about founders and owners. Intrepid Travel began in Melbourne in 1989 and G Adventures in Toronto in 1990; both have since passed through outside investors, and Intrepid through a joint venture and a series of acquisitions. This guide sets out who founded each brand, who owns it now and when that changed, as dated sources report it, and keeps each company’s own claims clearly marked as its own.

A new name ahead of the 50th year.

The name changed in 2023. TTG and Travel Weekly reported on 12 September 2023 that Exodus Travels had refreshed its branding with a new logo and a new name, Exodus Adventure Travels, ahead of its 50th anniversary in 2024, putting the word “adventure” at the front. Its managing director told TTG that the new look gave “a nod back” to the company’s overland routes, and the title described Travelopia as the parent company and said the operator ran more than 500 itineraries across 90 countries. To mark the anniversary the company offered 50 special departures in 2024, each with an additional experience, Travel Weekly reported, and it said responsible travel would remain at the heart of its approach.

Today the company describes itself as a UK-headquartered adventure tour operator running small-group, guided active holidays. It names its UK base as Surbiton, in Greater London, with offices in Seattle and Toronto, and says it runs trips in more than 90 countries on all seven continents: walking, trekking, cycling, wildlife, cultural, polar and family trips among them. Its trips typically include accommodation and transport within the country, the company says, with the exact inclusions and the difficulty level set out on each trip page. It says it is a certified B Corp and that the Exodus Adventure Travels Foundation supports grassroots nature and community projects. It lists Exodus Travels as its former brand name, Exodus Expeditions as its founding name and plain Exodus as the short form travellers use, and its website’s copyright line still names Exodus Travels Limited.

For a design guide, Exodus Travels shows how an operator can rename itself while keeping its founding year at the centre of its story. Compare Intrepid Travel and G Adventures, two other small-group adventure companies. For this guide we use a deep trail green, sand and a canyon orange with a sturdy sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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