Stride Travel Hires First Employee Through Travel Massive

Gavin Delany of Stride Travel hired their first full-time employee through attending Travel Massive San Francisco events. Here’s the Stride Travel success story.

Tell us a bit about you and the company.

I am a travel industry veteran with over 10 years experience, including executive and leadership roles at companies such as Viator and Kayak. CEO of Stride Travel.

Stride Travel is one of the first search and review sites for all experiential pre-planned trips – multi day guided tours, adventure travel packages, and small ship and river cruises. Stride offers a comprehensive variety of trips on every continent from over 400 leading and local tour operators.

Tell us your success story. How has Travel Massive helped your business goals?

Travel Massive has been a great networking tool for us, and we’ve made some truly valuable connections in 4 different facets of our business – recruiting, corporate partnerships, our Destination Expert network and giving back through not-for-profits. The value is clearly wide-ranging for us. For those who are unfamiliar, Stride is a metasearch review marketplace dedicated to group and independent travel packages.

We hired our first full time employee, Samantha Scott, after meeting her at a Travel Massive event last year. Samantha had been attending Travel Massive events looking to switch careers so it was a positive turning point for her as well! She started as an intern with Stride. After a stellar performance we hired her full time and she now works as our Content Coordinator and manager of our Destination Expert Network.

Travel Massive has been a great asset for her in finding bloggers and writers to work with to expand Stride’s Destination Expert network. For example we found Liz Shemaria.

We also found early partnerships for Stride with two tour operators, Give a Day Global and Travelove. When we met Give a Day Global, they were actually co-hosting the Travel Massive event, so we had the added benefit of hearing them speak about their company and mission. They were Stride’s first featured non-profit partner.

Lastly we were introduced personally to Travelove, a Czech tour company, by Erika Helstrom of Travel Massive – a great connection! We’ve featured their unique independent and family oriented tours on Stride’s marketplace for multi-day tours.

We’ve found Travel Massive to be a valuable event, gathering people from all different parts of the industry. We’ve made friends, partners, and built our team through connections made at the events. Look forward to continuing our success and involvement with Travel Massive!

Travel Massive Success Stories is a monthly series that profiles unique success stories in the Travel Massive community around the world. Connect with Gavin and Stride Travel on Travel Massive, Facebook and Twitter.