Trailfinders Brand Guidelines: An Earls Court Shop From 1970 and a Chain of Travel Centres

Backpacking tours and flights to Kathmandu.

Trailfinders was founded in London in 1970. English Wikipedia dates the start to October 1970, in an office on Earls Court Road in west London, and names the founder as Mike Gooley, now Sir Mike Gooley, who remains its owner and executive chairman. A Travel Weekly profile published in April 2001 said Gooley had first meant to start an overland tour company to Africa and Asia, found that market crowded, and noticed that the operators already running such trips had no agents selling for them. With three friends he set up Trailfinders instead. The first shop, on Earl’s Court Road, specialised in backpacking tours and in flights to Kathmandu and Delhi.

The company register shows the formal side. Companies House lists Trailfinders Limited as a private limited company incorporated on 11 March 1971 under the name Trail Finders Limited, written as two words; it took its present one-word name in June 1989. Its registered office is still in Earls Court, and the activities it lists are travel-agency and tour-operator work, together with software development. The register showed the company as active in November 2026, with its latest accounts made up to the end of February 2026.

English Wikipedia says that from 1972 the young company advertised discounted air tickets in the national press.

From one shop to a chain of travel centres.

Trailfinders has grown as a chain of what it calls travel centres. TravelMole reported in July 2005 that a new centre in Cardiff, its first in Wales, staffed by seven consultants and headed by the assistant manager of its Leeds travel centre, would bring the number of Trailfinders offices in the UK, Ireland and Australia to 23. TTG reported in August 2020 that a shop in Solihull had become its 39th outlet in the UK and Ireland, with five consultants under a general manager, opened as the brand marked its 50th year, with an enlarged Canterbury branch to follow the next week.

The growth continued on the high street. In February 2022 TTG reported plans for a 42nd branch, in Tunbridge Wells in Kent, with a recruitment drive for consultants across the UK and Ireland, and quoted the founder as saying the agency was continuing “to invest and grow in the high street.” In May 2024 Ealing.News reported that the 45th branch had opened at Dickens Yard in Ealing Broadway, with an initial staff of ten, as part of an expansion across the UK and a recruitment drive for travel consultants. Taken together, the dated reports show the count rising from 23 offices in 2005, Australia included, to 39 in 2020, 42 planned in 2022 and 45 in 2024. English Wikipedia now counts 44 travel centres in the UK and three in Ireland, and more than 1,100 staff; the 2001 Travel Weekly profile had counted 900.

The selling model is personal. English Wikipedia says the company specialises in tailor-made travel worldwide, with Europe, Australia and New Zealand, the Americas, Asia and Africa all on its list. The 2001 profile said most of its staff were well-travelled graduates, and the founder told Ealing.News in 2024 that the company had “always understood the value of speaking to someone face to face.”

How holiday companies present themselves.

Package-holiday operators and travel agencies sell something the customer cannot see before the trip, so the brand has to stand in for the holiday. In the shop era that meant printed brochures and the windows of high-street shops, filled with resort photographs and destination names. Online agencies moved the same job to booking pages, where search boxes, hotel photographs and a single package price do the work the brochure once did.

Television has been a second shop window. On the Beach aired its first TV advert in December 2013, a campaign filmed on Fuerteventura, according to English Wikipedia; loveholidays’ chief executive told City A.M. in 2024 that his company did not spend on TV advertising and leaned on social media and brand partnerships instead. Both approaches show the holiday rather than the company: sea, sand, pools and city streets.

Naming in the sector tends to be plain. Some brands describe the product or the destination, some carry a founder’s surname, and some are built to read as a web address. Holiday ranges and sub-brands are usually named for the kind of trip they sell, such as beach, city break, long haul or cruise, so a customer can tell them apart at a glance.

Corporate pages tell a different story from the booking pages: who founded the company and where, which investors have owned it, when it listed or was sold, and, for some firms in this set, when the business collapsed or was absorbed into another group. This guide sets out what dated sources record about each brand, and marks what rests only on the company’s own word.

One name, two words joined.

Trailfinders has stayed with its founder. English Wikipedia describes it as independently owned, with Sir Mike Gooley as owner and executive chairman, and the business has kept the same name through more than five decades; the only recorded change is the formal one in the register, when Trail Finders Limited became Trailfinders Limited in 1989. The name itself is a plain compound of “trail” and “finders.”

The name also appears well away from the travel centres. Trailfinders Sports Ground, just south of the A40 at the upper end of West Ealing, is home to the rugby union club Ealing Trailfinders, English Wikipedia says; the club’s registered playing name with the Rugby Football Union carries the travel company’s name, and it has played in the second tier of English rugby union since winning promotion in 2015, and the ground was the base of the London Broncos rugby league club between 2016 and 2020. Ealing.News reported in 2024 that the founder owns the Trailfinders rugby side, which plays at the Trailfinders Sportsclub, and that he expected many people in Ealing to know the name from the club before the new shop opened.

Across the sources the core of the business is consistent: a London shop that began by selling flights and backpacking tours to Asia, which became a chain of consultant-led travel centres in the UK and Ireland, selling tailor-made trips worldwide under a name that has not changed since 1970.

For a design guide, Trailfinders shows how a travel company can build recognition through a single compound name, repeated shop by shop, without a change of owner or a change of name, and how a travel brand can live as much on a shopfront and a rugby ground as on a screen. Compare it with Kuoni, which also sells tailor-made long-haul holidays through its own shops, and Flight Centre, another chain of travel shops. For this guide we use a deep green, map ochre and atlas ink with a bookish serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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