Yes, after nearly 30 years of being Adventure Travel, we decided it was time to change our name.

When Adventure Travel was conceived in the mid 1980’s, travel beyond Australia was far less common than it is today, and considered something of an ‘Adventure’. The founders of the business were hardened travellers, and were keen to promote overland travel across Africa, South America and Asia by truck, trekking in Nepal and other challenging active holidays. Between us, we’ve all done this type of Adventure travel, and we still love to organise it, but the reality is that our focus has broadened significantly over the years.

In 1999 my irrepressible business partner Chris bought Adventure Travel, and the rest, as they say, is history.

In the last 14 years, we have endeavoured to promote destinations like Antarctica, Cuba, Botswana, Croatia, Vietnam, Central Asia & Myanmar that were considered pretty new at the time to Christchurch travellers.

We’ve also championed new ways of exploring familiar destinations, especially in Europe. Examples include villa, house and apartment stays, self-guided walking and cycling holidays and small ship, river, and expedition cruising.

The reality is that holidays in Europe now account for over 50% of our business, and this can confuse people when we tell them we are ‘Adventure’ travel as they don’t immediately associate Europe with ‘Adventure’. They may think we are about bungy jumping, rafting or any of the other adventure sports New Zealand has become famous for.

We’ve been planning a change of name for some time to better reflect the wide variety of destinations and styles of travel we specialise in. Mother Nature intervened when we tried 2 years ago, but now we’re ready!

So, we’d like to introduce you to Discover Travel.

Don’t worry, we’re the same people, Chris & I are still your local owner-operators, and we will continue to “do what we do”. In every way that’s important, it’s business as usual!

You will see some exciting changes though – we’ll invite you via our advertising, popular travel shows and newsletters to “Discover” certain destinations, experiences and activities in even greater depth, and this, our brand new website has a lot of new information, articles and news. In time, the new website will include an ‘insiders’ section for you, founder members of the ‘Discovery’ Club, where we will make available our notes on destinations including the hints and tips that we know are useful in your travel planning.

We will also be inviting you to ‘Discover With Us’ by expanding our range of Escorted Tours from Christchurch, enjoy our ever popular Swahili Safari, our unique Ethiopia tour or our luxurious Royal Rajasthan tours – all hosted by Sue Verrall.  We are constantly looking for new tour destinations and are currently working on Vietnam and Canada and Alaska – watch this space.

It’s our loyal and lovely clients that have enabled us to finally get to this point.

Many companies re-brand when times are tough, but the reality for us is the opposite. We can do this because we’ve enjoyed a decade of success and growth. We’ve grown 4 fold in the last 10 years, and have experienced 20% growth in each of the last 2 years alone!

The reality is that we really love what we do and we love the freedom to be innovators in our industry.

We don’t just view travel as another commodity to be sold, we’re not interested in yelling ‘deals’ at you, and we don’t just open a brochure and ask you ‘which one do you want’?

We do believe our role is to inform and inspire you to travel, and to work with you to create great travel experiences, and that’s why we hire the best travel consultants in the business.

So we’d like to sincerely thank you for giving us the opportunity to do what we do.

Welcome aboard, we hope you enjoy the journey with us!