Our Story

1970 - Trailfinders was formed by Mike Gooley with a staff of 4 as an overland tour operator

1971 - first edition of the Trailfinder Magazine was published

1973 - became the first organisation to advertise discount air tickets in the national press and emerged as the field leader

1977 - recorded our first profit

1979 - became the first 'bucket shop' and the first travel organiser to be IATA licensed, the first to connect directly into the Airline Computer Reservation System and the first to be granted an ATOL licence by the CAA and admitted to ABTA shortly thereafter

1989 - Kensington flagship Travel Centre opens, a state of the art one stop travel shop and the largest retail travel outlet in the UK at 11,500 sq ft

1992 - book our 1 millionth client

1993 - set up the Clients' Trust account protecting all client's funds paid to us and remaining unique in our field

1995 - Mike Gooley sets up the TF Charity with a £1 million donation

1997 - purchase the Great Western Railway Athletic Club in Ealing and the TF Sports Club is born

1998 - the TF website goes live and we introduce an out of hours service providing 24/7/365 support to our clients

2002 - the Trailfinder Magazine surpasses one million print run and a mail out of over 550,000

2004 - the Trailfinders Charity passes £10 million in donations and The Sunday Times Rich List names Mike Gooley as the fourteenth most generous giver to charity

2006 - Mike Gooley is awarded a CBE for his services to the Travel Industry and to charity

2007 - book our 10 millionth client

2008 - our Vice Chairman, Tristan Gooley, successfully completes a solo Transatlantic sail from Lanzarote to St Lucia, making him the only living person to have both flown and sailed solo across the Atlantic 

2019 - book our 16 millionth client and sponsor I'm a Celebrity on ITV

2020 - in response to Covid19 TF teams are quickly equipped to work from home, able to support our clients without delay.  Over 100,00 TF clients are affected; we repatriate over 20,000 and process over £180 million in refunds to clients

2021 - 12 June Mike receives a knighthood in the 2021 Queen’s Birthday Honours List. The honour was made for services to business and charity.

2023 - for the tenth consecutive year, and since the inception of the awards, Trailfinders is voted Best Tour Operator by readers of The Times, The Sunday Times and The Sunday Times Travel Magazine.

2024 - in partnership with the Woodland Trust working towards planting 1 million trees with the potential to remove 250,000 tonnes of carbon from the atmosphere. As of August 2024 we have planted over 915,000, spread over a number of projects in Belfast, Cardiff, Devon, Sheffield and Edinburgh.

Tomorrow... our travel consultants, who combined have travelled to over 96% of the world's countries, will continue to take pride in their ability to exactly match the perfect travel products to each individual client's needs and exceed their expectations at every opportunity.