Q&A: Inspiring Travel’s Matt Rushbrook

With multi-centre stays soaring in popularity, Inspiring Travel has launched its first brochure dedicated to this style of travel. Aspire’s Isobel Turner sits down with the operator’s commercial and product director Matt Rushbrook to find out more about the launch and how 2025 has been for business.

Q: Tell us a bit more about Luxury Adventures Tailored to You and why now was the right time to launch a brochure of this type.  

What we find is a lot of clients are now looking to do multi-centres within specific countries, but also multi-country as well, and this brochure really brings all that together. In our luxury division, bookings for multi-centres are up 18% year on year. We’ve seen a big increase in clients wanting to travel around places such as Vietnam or Thailand, and visit lots of different destinations there. We’ve also seen that in Mauritius or Saint Lucia and in other countries where more clients would previously do single centres. People are looking to do more multi-centre travel within the same country.

Q: What can agents expect from the brochure?

We begin the brochure by telling agents the best time to travel, because we know that’s one of the things they get asked. The other thing that we’ve done is give suggested highlights of the destinations, just to give a flavour, instead of going day by day. We just give them an idea of what we recommend from our first-hand experience and what kind of experiences you can do in those destinations as well. The brochure covers the whole breath of our product. We have Asia, Australasia, North America and Europe, but we haven’t forgotten some of those traditional destinations, including the Indian Ocean and Caribbean, which you can combine as well into a multi-centre.

Q: What other destinations are popular at the moment?

Asia has probably seen the biggest increase, as bookings are up 30% year on year. People are visiting Cambodia, Vietnam and Laos, for example. We’ve also seen more island-hopping and more people travelling around Europe. In the past, Inspiring Travel has been known for probably quite a lot of beach destinations, but now we can see that clients are looking for more out of a holiday.

Q: As well as multi-centre travel, which trends are you seeing at the moment?

We’ve really seen the experiential side growing within our classic single-centre countries, like the Caribbean, Europe and the Indian Ocean. The other thing that has grown is all-inclusive – we’ve seen more people booking premium all-inclusive across more beach destinations. More clients are also travelling with larger families, or even two families travelling together. We’ve extended our villas and residences programme and [in the brochure] we’ve highlighted properties that we think are good for more multi-generational travel. Nordic winter breaks have also definitely had more demand, and we’re launching a Nordic programme next month.

Q: What plans do you have to celebrate the launch of the brochure?

We’re hosting an agent event at The Ivy in Oxford on November 27. We have 20 agents coming and we’re very excited about bringing that to life. [Multi-centre travel] is a big passion of mine and I’m excited about bringing all these destinations to life.

Q: How do you hope to continue engaging with the trade in 2026?

Fam trips are obviously important, and we normally start planning these in February. It’s very important to get people out to the destinations within this brochure as well, to bring some of that to light. We will also be doing showcases up and down the country, and we launched ski a couple of years ago so we will be doing some ski events with agents. Cruise is still growing for us, so ski and cruise are definitely key events that we want to do. We’ll be coming out with an engagement calendar as soon as possible in the new year.