As the world’s largest B Corp travel company, Melbourne-based Intrepid has become a global example of how purpose, travel and profit can coexist.
The company has achieved something few businesses can boast: sustained growth while embedding positive impact into the way it operates, from responsible tourism and community investment to its broader commitment to being a force for good.
At a time when the social and environmental impacts of travel are under the microscope like never before, Intrepid provides a rare example of what good looks like.
But according to co-founder Darrell Wade, the very principles that have driven Intrepid’s success – long-term thinking, stakeholder focus and a willingness to take risks – were the exact same reasons it struggled inside a listed structure.
In this exclusive interview with Travel Weekly, Wade reflects on Intrepid’s brief chapter inside global travel giant TUI, why the model ultimately failed, what the experience revealed about the tension between purpose and quarterly reporting, and why he ardently believes business remains the most powerful vehicle for creating change at scale.
When it comes to global warming, Wade also offers something we don’t see much: hope. Well, at least in the long term.
“A disaster”
Wade is unusually candid when reflecting on Intrepid’s years inside a joint venture with TUI.
“It was a pretty traumatic time,” he says, although his smile suggests he has since recovered.
“We did this joint venture with TUI, and in retrospect, I made some fundamental errors.”
The commercial logic initially appeared straightforward, he explains.
TUI had brought together 17 adventure travel businesses, including Intrepid, into a new holding company, with the ambition of replicating Intrepid’s growth trajectory across the portfolio.
“The logic was that we would get those businesses to grow circa 20, 25 per cent a year, just like Intrepid always had, so it didn’t seem that hard,” Wade says.
But what he underestimated was the fundamental difference between a privately owned, purpose-led business and a company operating within a listed environment.
“What I completely misread was that listed companies just become far more risk averse than private companies,” he says.
“They also become a much shorter-term horizon. There was no strategic vision whatsoever. It was just a mixture of oil and water.”
Whilst being candid about the misalignment, Wade is careful not to position the experience as a criticism of TUI.
“I’m not saying we’re right or they’re wrong – it was just culturally so different, and it didn’t work.”
The consequences were significant.
Rather than lifting the other companies up, Intrepid found itself being dragged down.
“Rather than getting all those companies to grow at circa Intrepid’s kind of growth rate, the opposite happened, and Intrepid stopped growing,” Wade says.
After four years of flat performance, Wade and his team decided something had to change.
The solution was not a new strategy, it was a new structure.
“We gave TUI every bit of cash on the balance sheet, and two or three of the businesses back. We kept the rest, and then we just started growing it again,” he says.
“Literally the month after we exited and started fresh, we did start growing again. We haven’t stopped since, with the exception of COVID.”
The most revealing part of the experience, Wade says, was that almost nothing about the company itself had changed.
“At the end of the day, the people were the same. We had the same teams, the same systems, products were kind of the same – but somehow that culture shift changed going into that JV, and it changed dramatically again coming out of it.”
For Wade, the lesson was not that listed companies cannot succeed. It was that the incentives of public markets can make it difficult for businesses built around long-term purpose to operate.
“It’s fine if you’re an investment analyst and you’re looking at quarterly results, that’s your job,” he says.
“But really, a company can never grow or achieve anything in a quarter.”
Built for the long game
Looking at the size of Intrepid today, you might assume that the purpose-led business model had emerged from careful strategic discussions.
In reality, it was born of an offhand conversation in the back of a truck in Africa in the late 80s, when Wade was travelling with his business partner, co-founder and his wife Anna.
“We’re literally in the cab of a truck driving across Africa, and we were talking about the business idea of Intrepid,” Wade says.
“But in the same conversation, I think it was Anna [his wife] who started the conversation, saying, ‘Look, if we do okay out of this idea, we should get back to the destinations where we get our living from.’”
Before Intrepid had made a single sale, the founders had already begun thinking about how the business could contribute back to the places it operated.
The company’s approach to impact evolved over time, from early donations to the creation of a foundation that allows travellers to contribute to projects in destinations they visit, with Intrepid matching those contributions.
But Wade says the company’s approach to responsible tourism was also shaped by one of its earliest group leaders, a former social worker named Sally.
“She really started to take a different lens to it, saying: ‘We’re travelling through Thailand and Malaysia and Borneo – how can we actively contribute back into those societies, rather than just the money we’re spending, or even in a philanthropic sense?’”
“She was the one who really instilled what we now call responsible tourism into the business. In fact, I think she came up with the term.”
Whilst Wade is quick to acknowledge the key influence of Sally in developing what Intrepid stands for, he can’t credit her with Intrepid’s commercial success.
“To be honest, she would have been lousy if she’d had her own business,” he says, laughing.
“But as a contributor to the philosophy of what we’re doing, she was second to none.”
Stakeholders, not just shareholders
The experience with TUI reinforced a broader belief Wade has held throughout Intrepid’s history: that businesses need to consider more than shareholder returns.
“If you take a more holistic view and look at your different stakeholder groups as part of your business – which they are – you start to think of it differently,” he says.
For Intrepid, those stakeholders include employees, customers, suppliers and travel partners.
“They want to work for a company that believes in something, that acts on something and is a good corporate citizen.”
Like Intrepid’s current CEO, James Thornton, Wade quickly pushes back on any notion of purpose and commercial success being separate entities.
“The more you do in the purpose and impact space, the more your staff and customers and supply chain and partners appreciate it,” he says.
“Which means the more sales you get, the more money you make, which means the more you can invest back into purpose initiatives.”
“There’s this real flywheel effect.”
The challenge, he says, is that businesses need patience to allow that cycle to compound.
“It still surprises me how few companies really adopt that principle. You’ve got to bake it in pretty deeply.”
Business as a vehicle for change
Wade, who also chairs Philanthropy Australia, has spent much of his career thinking about how organisations can create meaningful social impact.
But when asked whether business or charity is the more effective vehicle for creating lasting change, he doesn’t stop to think.
“Business.”
He explains that philanthropy plays an important role in starting initiatives, but struggles to deliver solutions at scale.
“Philanthropy is a very useful catalytic tool for getting things started – stimulating new work in education or healthcare,” he says.
“But ultimately, philanthropy can’t sustain anything, because it’s just too hard getting constant money in.”
The difference, Wade argues, is that business creates scale.
“In Intrepid’s first year, we had 47 travellers. This year we’ll have 400,000 or so.”
“That scale grows with business.”
He points to the economic opportunities created through tourism, including a conversation with an Intrepid employee in Kenya who told him his job had allowed two of his children to attend university.
“He wasn’t a senior manager or anything. He was a driver/guide,” Wade says.
“But it just shows business provides income, training, vocational opportunities. Philanthropy can’t really do that stuff.”
A different clock
For Wade, the difference between Intrepid and a listed company ultimately comes down to time.
While public markets provide accountability and transparency, he believes meaningful transformation requires a longer horizon than quarterly reporting allows.
“We’ve just started planning for 2040, which sounds like a crazy thing to do,” he says.
“This is at a board level, but we’re saying, okay, our 2030 strategic plan, we’re kind of halfway into that. We’re going to overachieve it. Let’s take the next chapter and the five years and the 10 years after that.”
That planning covers everything from products and markets to the company’s social and environmental impact.
“Unless you’re really planning in the long term like that, you’re just not going to achieve anything,” he says.
“Because if you’re only ever planning quarter by quarter or month by month, you can’t really fulfil a strategic aim.”
That long-term approach has also shaped how Intrepid responds to disruption.
The company has faced another difficult year following disruption in the Middle East, with lost airline capacity and affected destinations.
“This year will not be the year that we thought it was going to be in March,” Wade says.
“We’ve taken a hit because you’ve lost your Middle East airlines, you’ve lost a couple of key destinations, so we’ll have a pretty ordinary year.”
But rather than changing strategy, Wade says Intrepid’s board has remained focused.
“The board is super relaxed about it. We’re just saying, okay, look, this happened. It was beyond our control. Let’s just keep the strategy in place. Don’t change anything. It’ll come back. We have confidence.”
A listed company, he believes, may face greater pressure to react immediately.
“Whereas a listed company will probably hit the panic buttons just that little bit earlier.”
Beyond sustainability
Wade is also cautious about how the travel industry talks about sustainability.
While Intrepid remains deeply committed to reducing its environmental impact, he argues the industry needs to be more honest about where it stands.
“I will still use the word sustainable, but sustainability is something you’re seeking, not something you’re actually doing,” he says.
“It’s an aspiration, it’s not a deliverable.”
Travel, he says, still has unavoidable impacts.
“Unfortunately for us, travel is not sustainable.”
“If that carbon problem had been solved, then maybe we are sustainable.”
Instead, he believes businesses need to focus on responsible action while acknowledging the complexity of the challenges.
“Five years ago, we were still talking about climate change landing. When will it land? Well, it’s landed now.”
However, Wade remains optimistic that solutions are possible.
“I think we’re very close to peak carbon now,” he says, pointing to advances in renewable energy and electrification.
“The future is great in that sense, but we don’t quite know the rocky patch between now and 2100.”
Building something that outlasts the founders
Whilst some founders might balk at contemplating a company that lives on without them. For Wade, the ultimate measure of Intrepid’s success is whether the company can continue creating impact after its founders are gone.
While he expects to step away from the business in the coming years, he says his focus has never been on maximising a personal return.
“We’re certainly not looking at what can we do now to maximise our cheque size,” he says.
“What we’re looking to do is saying, well, what can we do now to ensure that this company continues to grow, prosper, and do great stuff and have great impact well after we’re gone.”
That transition has been years in the making.
Wade moved away from the CEO role, first appointing James Thornton as managing director before handing over the CEO position, deliberately creating a structure where the company could continue without depending on its founders.
“We just go off into the sunset, and the business itself has got the structure and the wherewithal to do it,” he says.
“For me, that would be a job well done.”
