RatPack Travel Opens Manchester Office to Sell ANZ Road Trips at the Source

UK travellers already account for roughly a quarter of RatPack Travel's customers. Now the Byron Bay campervan and RV booking service has opened its first international office in Manchester, the founders' hometown, to sell Australia and New Zealand road trips directly into that demand.

The move is a distribution play, not a vanity expansion. Cousins Sammy and Mikey Finley, who grew up in Manchester, launched RatPack in Byron Bay in 2016, booking tours for backpackers from a renovated 1973 bus. The new office lets the company advise UK, Irish and European customers in their own time zone — demand previously handled from Australia, at hours that suited nobody west of Sydney.

What gap is RatPack filling?

The founders argue the market is thinner than it was. Many specialist agencies selling Australia and New Zealand road trips closed during COVID and never reopened, they said, leaving unserved demand at the origin end of the booking funnel. RatPack is positioning its Manchester team — staffed entirely, the company says, with experienced Australia and New Zealand travellers — as the replacement channel.

That claim is credible on its face. Specialist long-haul road trip retailing is a niche with thin margins, and the pandemic hollowed out plenty of it. Whether RatPack can convert that vacancy into share, rather than just inheriting its own existing UK bookers, is the open question.

How the business model holds up

The numbers the company discloses point to a business of real scale for its niche:

• More than 40 employees across Byron Bay and Manchester
• More than 3,000 five-star Google and Facebook reviews
• Contracts with campervan and RV operators in both Australia and New Zealand
• New partnerships signed with Discovery and Ingenia
• A 24-hour personalised booking concierge, free to customers, with a promise to match any price found online

The model is the familiar agency play: free to the consumer, monetised through operator commissions. The price-match promise is a blunt defensive tool against direct operator booking and the online travel agencies — it removes the customer's main reason to book elsewhere. Costly, perhaps, but cheaper than losing the booking.

RatPack's survival through the border closures also explains its current strength. When Australia shut, the business pivoted to campervan and RV hire for domestic travellers and kept investing in content and service while much of the sector went quiet. That maintained operator relationships and cash flow through the trough.

What happens next

Back in Byron Bay, RatPack has outgrown its headquarters. Finance, marketing, technology and customer service teams are moving into new premises next door — effectively a second Byron Bay office at the same time as the first UK one.

Sammy Finley framed the dual expansion around the company's tenth anniversary. "In business you don't often stop to reflect, but I guess a 10-year anniversary makes you," he said. "Ten years ago, I was running RatPack out of a bus, just trying to help travellers have the best possible road trip."

He added: "The mission remains the same. Now we're opening a second office in Byron Bay and our first in the UK, in Manchester. It's a huge milestone for our team. It means we can look after more travellers, in their own time zone, delivering more of the personalised RatPack touch."

For sellers of long-haul road trips, the signal is straightforward: origin-market specialist retailing is rebuilding, and the first movers are the operators that never fully stopped.