Michael’s story
Michael Wright never set out with a motivation to start, grow and sell a highly successful travel business when he was growing up.
“School years were tough,” he recalls. “My mum was a single parent and always wanted me to be more successful than she was, so she suggested I get a job at a bank. I did, and I hated it, but it was valuable in the sense that it told me what I didn’t want to do.”
Michael ended up in France working at a campsite. It was a simple but efficient life – he wasn’t earning a lot, but neither did he need to spend much to enjoy living in a nice part of the world.
It was here that something of a eureka moment occurred. “I started selling melons to people at the beach because I thought it was a bit more refreshing than the usual stuff you get there,” he recalls. “I packaged it up nicely with ice and crinkle cut lemons and made a 600% markup.”
Using the money he made from melons, Michael bought himself two caravans which he started to let out. That spiralled to 120 within a few short years, while at the same time, the entrepreneur got into the business of selling and conducting coach tours, using local press to offer discounts to lure in the “grey pound”.
From melons to millions
In 1984, Michael’s endeavours reached the point where he couldn’t manage the campsite and coach tour business at the same time. So, he sold the campsite business and founded Riviera Travel. The company continued to offer mind-bogglingly good value coach tours to France and people continued to lap it up.
“Some of the deals were crazy in the early days,” Michael adds. “We would be offering all-inclusive travel and four-star hotel accommodation in Paris for £99 and I worked like a madman at all hours to make it happen.”
As revenue grew, so too did Michael’s team. “I had to teach everyone from the bottom up”, he says. “All of our management came in at the bottom, but I wouldn’t have it any other way. We often referred to ourselves as a business of misfits, and I like that analogy. There is no such thing as a silly idea, apart from the ones which haven’t been mentioned.”
Riviera Travel takes off
Several key developments defined Riviera’s growth journey through the 1990s and 2000s. The company phased out coach tours and soon became one of Eurostar’s biggest customers, while air tours also took off in the 1990s as Michael struck up lucrative partnerships with the up-and-coming budget airlines. Here, new markets such as inland Spain as well as off-season deals on flights added to the momentum being built.
“I was happy to stay off the radar somewhat at this point,” Michael says. “Very few in the sector actually knew what our business was doing, so we didn’t really have any copycats out there, unlike the many people who also started selling melons back on the beach in France.”
At the end of 2008, Michael and his new Managing Director took a calculated risk to venture into the world of river cruises. Despite doing this off the back of the financial crisis, the gamble paid off handsomely with the company going on to have its own ships built.
By 2014, Riviera was carrying in excess of 110,000 customers on holidays all over the world by air, land and sea. Turnover had reached £130 million, making it the largest escorted tour operator in the market, as well as the second largest provider of river cruises.
The road to private equity
In May of that year, Michael made the decision to sell the business. It wasn’t a decision made lightly, and after several months preparing and scoping out options, he started to think about a private equity solution.
“I didn’t want to sell to a company like TUI or Thomas Cook,” Michael says. “My main priority was to find the right buyer for all the people I would be leaving behind.”
“What struck me about Phoenix was that they really did care,” Michael continues. “They took time to understand Riviera, what it stands for and what it was trying to achieve. They spoke to a lot of people at the business, not just the top leadership – asking plenty of questions and showing they were good listeners. At the same time, they had compelling ideas about how to grow.”
Over Phoenix’s three-year investment period, EBITDA grew by around 80% and headcount by 40% with moves being made to set up in the US and Australia; brand recognition increased threefold.
Life beyond Riviera
Michael assumed a non-executive director role for the final two years of the Phoenix investment period, with Riviera exiting in December 2017. Since then, and owing to the relationship he had built up, he has extended the partnership with Phoenix by investing his own capital into two Phoenix funds.
Now, he continues to fully embrace retirement through hobbies such as cooking, reading, sailing and, of course, exploring the wonders of the world. He hasn’t entirely detached himself from the business world, involved in philanthropy and personally managing his own investments.
“They keep me ticking along nicely,” Michael says. “If you were to ask what my retirement ambitions are, my answer is that I didn’t exit the business with any plan. The only plan, I suppose, is to be happy and do what I can to make the people around me happy as well.”
