About Us

The Seniors Holiday Travel Story 

One Friday afternoon after work back in May 1998, I was having a chat with my new boss in Queensland Rail's Traveltrain about why the trains 'should be full'. He'd only arrived in Australia from New Zealand the previous week, and as 'Noo Zelund' didn't have a major rail network, they naturally didn't have a system like the one in Queensland whereby all Queensland pensioners were entitled to 'free rail travel' for up to two return journeys each year, with the State Government paying Queensland Rail for this pensioner entitlement.

I then explained what the system meant, and how many pensioners there were in Queensland, and how many used their free rail vouchers only about one third. He finally grasped what I was trying to explain (he was from NZ, after all...) and then 'the light bulb turned on' in the next five minutes, we decided to organise a business to get pensioners onto the Queensland Rail trains.

A couple of months later, we'd formed a company, arranged our legal authority to operate as travel agents in Queensland under the approval and cover of the Travel Compensation Fund and had set up our first package, which was a return trip from Brisbane up to Cairns on The Sunlander, 5 nights accommodation with breakfast and three course dinner daily, two cruises and a trip up to Kuranda on the famous Kuranda Scenic Rail, as well as transfers in Cairns and all for the princely sum of $444!

Of course, we needed customers, so I took my twin daughters, EMMA and ELISSA, who were 4 years old at the time (they still remember doing this), dressed them up in 'pretty pink' and they stood outside the Brisbane Performing Arts Centre on a Saturday afternoon, when the 'seniors' were coming out after the matinee shows, handing out fliers of our brand new Cairns package, and the bookings started to come in.

Within several months we were sending over two hundred club members a month up to Cairns.

The next year, our club members who had been to Cairns utilising their free rail vouchers wanted a new holiday that also incorporated their next lot of free rail vouchers, so we expanded our rail packages to include Rockhampton, Yeppoon, Airlie Beach, Bundaberg, Charleville and Longreach.

Then my wife JOAN wanted to go to Norfolk Island for a holiday, so off we went, and when we came back, I organised a group departure for our club members, and it was so popular we had to send groups on consecutive weeks!

Then we started sending groups of club members to Tasmania, New Zealand, Western Australia for the Wildflowers, Canada & Alaska, UK & Europe, Scandinavia & Iceland, Egypt, China, Vietnam, South America, Eastern USA in the Fall and many other destinations, as well as putting together many of our own exclusive group tours in Australia.

And of course several years ago our club members caught the 'cruising bug' and we've been sending hundreds of them off on cruises every year.

Over the past thirteen years, we've won well over 100 awards and quite a few individual staff awards and we now have over 75,000 club members - it's very hard to believe how far we've come from where we set out, although I guess it was 'last century'!

Written by Perry Morcombe, Founder, CEO & Managing Director