Temple World – luxury travel agency in Chiswick

Image above: Elephant Plains leopard

Not your average travel experience

Alice Burns went on archaeological digs with her father in Southern Africa as a child, an experience which instilled in her a lifelong sense of adventure and led ultimately to her working in the travel industry.

“My childhood was like Narnia” she told The Chiswick Calendar. “Constant winter. Our family would spend six months in Swaziland [officially renamed Eswatini in 2018] and six months in the UK. I went to school in both, alternating between the two schools, so I never got the long summer holidays.

“Winter was the dry season in Southern Africa when my father would go on digs and my brother and I would go with him, camping out in the bush.”

Images above: Alice and brother David being looked after by Violet in Eswatini, c 1978 and exploring the Siphiso cave c 1982

“Nobody should have to pay more than the sum of the components of their holiday”

Now she runs Temple World, a travel agency in Chiswick with three colleagues, Beth, Lia and Lucy.

Having done the nine-to-five for many years in big organisations such as Abercrombie and Kent, she and the others have the expertise and specialist contacts to put together individual luxury holiday packages customised for their clients, but do not have the overheads of expensive offices to pass on to their customers, as they work from home.

“Nobody should have to pay more than the sum of the components of their holiday” she says. “We don’t charge a fee.”

Hotels charge one rate for toursits and another for professional bookers, which is where they make their money.

“All the research and planning and booking we do is covered by the commission we are paid by hotels.”

Image above: Lia, Alice (centre) and Beth

One trip for the family and one for me!

They pride themselves in giving their clients a unique experience – luxury journeys to exotic destinations with boutique accommodation in out of the way places – and they only offer destinations they have experienced themselves.

For Alice what constitutes luxury is being able to have an experience which no one else has had. For a safari she recommends two nights in a lodge in a private reserve rather than five nights in a public reserve, so when your guide spots a lion or a leopard, rather than radioing the other guides so there is suddenly a group of jeeps jockeying for position, they warn other parties off to give you twenty minutes there by yourselves.

Each year she takes trips with her own family (she has two children at Grove Park Primary School) and some on her own. The Inca trail is one she did recently by herself, while Sri Lanka is a destination she would recommend for a family.

“I am passionate that kids should travel. People say to me they won’t remember it, but they get used to the idea of moving from one place to the next and experiencing new things.”

Image above: Alice with her own family on holiday in Egypt and Wadi Rum, Jordan

Finding the off-beat but avoiding the ‘hairy’ places

With her background, Temple World have become experts in African safaris, in the Maasai Mara and Botswana, but they are also very well-travelled in South East Asia and the the eastern Mediterranean – Turkey and Greece.

“We used to do trips to Syria and Libya” she told me. “We have more than 30 years in the travel business between us and we are excellent in a crisis.”

Alice has had to extract people from dangerous situations – volcanic eruptions and political coups – and just tedious, frustrating situations such as strikes. She worked through 9/11, not nine to five at all, trying to get people whose planes had been diverted back to where they wanted to be.

They have to keep a close eye on the politics of the countries where they send people, to know when there are elections and tensions might be running high for example, or when seasonal bad weather, such as cyclones, might make a trip miserable.

Looking at a map of East Africa she singled out Pemba Island, part of Tanzania’s Zanzibar Archipelago as a fabulous spot for a holiday, but said she had stopped booking trips in northern Mozambique as it had become “too hairy”.

Images above: A beach in Thailand and a cooking class in Amman

Favourite trips for families

She takes a ‘Gulet’ charter every year with her husband and children off the coast of Turkey.

“You have exclusive use of a wooden sailing boat, which is crewed and all inclusive, fully catered. You pick a stretch of coast and can opt for somewhere where there are lots of watersports to take part in, or archaeological remains you can only reach by boat.

“They are £16,000 – £18,000 for a week, plus flights, but they accommodate 12 – 16 people so they work out about £1,200 per person, plus flights. They are perfect for a big birthday, for an intergenerational holiday.”

The price of luxury

Her two biggest groups of clients are families and honeymooners. Prices range from around £5,000 to half a million pounds.

What do you get for £5,000?

“I fixed a 12 night holiday for a honeymoon couple in Thailand over Christmas. Beach holidays go up at Christmas but if you are prepared to spend Christmas itself in Bangkok and then go to the beach after, the prices come down.”

And half a million pounds?

“The half a million pounds trip was a reclusive billionaire who wanted to go on a round the world trip for a year with her two young children before they reached school age.

“She wanted to photograph the migration of Wildbeast in the Maasai Mara, and to travel to South Korea and Japan, Vietnam, Indonesia, the Kenyan coast and the Seychelles. She travelled business class with two nannies. They had a rota and one nanny would fly back with the luggage for a break and the next would fly out with the luggage for the next lef of the trip.

“She liked sports fishing, so we chartered boats for deep sea fishing and her mother came out for a while. She wanted Chablis in Cuba. That was really tricky.”

Alice and her colleagues give you their personal mobile numbers when you go on your trip, so if you do run into difficulties you only have to make one call. No hanging on the line for hours trying to get through to BA. They do that for you.

More than half their work is repeat customers, and I am beginning to see why.

If you are contemplating a luxury holiday, contact Temple World on 0208 940 4114.

templeworld.com

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