For some, having five children might be a deterrent to starting a business. For Holly Velardo, it was the ammunition.
“I’d always wanted to open my own agency, but between the children and everything else, I just went, ‘Oh, it’s not the right time,'” she tells Travel Weekly.
It wasn’t until her fourth and fifth children, twins, that Velardo went all in.
“There is no way I want to travel 45 minutes into the city every day and leave them and not have the freedom to be who I wanted to be,” she says.
“‘I knew I could never go back to working full time for someone else,” she says.
And so Hollyday Travel was born in 2018.
Velardo, known for her positivity and refusal to sugarcoat things, doesn’t gloss over the realities of launching a business with five children in tow.
“I remember breastfeeding both of them, sending text messages, trying to call clients, sending emails with both of them, feeding them at the same time, and the logistics of the school run, the school pick-up, trying to work school hours, really late nights, fitting it in whenever I could,” she says.
She also welcomed clients into her home, meaning everything had to be immaculate and calm before every appointment.
“It was a lot, but that’s one of the biggest things – sitting down with clients and dreaming with them and creating that relationship. It was juggling a lot, but I wouldn’t change it for the world.”
Communication in crisis
Just two years into the business, Velardo faced the biggest disruption the travel industry had seen: Covid.
Hollyday Travel is now a thriving operation with five full-time staff, but Velardo credits her communication during the pandemic, rather than the bookings that followed it, as a major turning point.
During Covid, she made a habit of communicating with stranded and worried travellers, regardless of whether they’d ever booked with her.
“It was definitely because of communication, and because I did help so many people during that time with no intention of ever knowing if they were going to book with me – just genuinely concerned that they were stuck,” she says.
“I think that really built my newsletter list every week and gave people that trust in me that I was there throughout that whole time, and I wasn’t going anywhere.”
That consistency is all the more striking given her own circumstances.
Two years into the business, Velardo was forced to take work in another industry to support her family.
“We had to refund like ridiculous amounts of money, so we worked full-time. I worked full-time in another industry… We had five kids in private school that year. We had to pay the bills. My husband was also at the airport and he had no work either. So we both had to change industry.”
She hated every minute of it.
“I hated not being in the industry. So every night I worked full-time [elsewhere] doing admin work – it was an insurance building industry, and some work at schools, whatever it was. We had to pay the bills.”
But she never lost sight of the goal.
“I’m always from the mindset of I’ll do whatever it takes, and I had to support my family, but I hated it. Every night I’d come home, put all the kids to bed, and then I would do my newsletter. I’d research everything that was going on. I’d learn about the industry. I’d follow up refunds. I’d stay in touch with clients, help them out, whatever was needed. I knew that the minute I could, I was coming back.”
When the borders reopened, Velardo returned to travel almost immediately, and began hiring.
“I had to quit and go back full-time into this, and hiring staff.”
The same instinct for honest, front-footed communication has carried through into more recent global instability, with Velardo among the first in the industry to update clients when tensions escalated in the Middle East this year.
“What you’re seeing in the media isn’t always true,” she says. “If you want to know what’s happening, come to somebody in the industry who has the firsthand information from ATIA, from DFAT, rather than the clickbait media that’s potentially out there freaking everybody out.”
Even then, she’s careful not to overstate her certainty.
“I don’t sit there and go, ‘This is what’s happening, this is what’s going to happen, and I know all the answers.’ I tell them, ‘This is the information I’ve got access to right now. I am giving you everything I know. I can only tell you what I know.'”
And crucially, she leaves the decision with the client.
“We’ve trained the whole team to say, do not say ‘we recommend’ because we don’t want to recommend anything. We have to say, ‘This is the information we can give you, but this is completely your decision.'”
Boundaries, not burnout
Velardo’s openness with clients hasn’t come at the cost of her own time. She’s deliberate about where the line sits.
“I work 9.30 till 4pm every day, Monday to Friday. But I do not see clients on a Wednesday. That is my planning day.”
It hasn’t come naturally.
“I’m definitely a people pleaser. I’ve had to learn to say no, and that is still hard for me. But I’m still learning, and I’m getting there. I feel so much better when I make those decisions for my family or myself.”
She’s lost clients over it and made peace with that.
“I did lose a couple, but they weren’t for me. If they can’t respect me and my lifestyle and my family, then I don’t want them as a client.”
Genuine emergencies still reach her, via a WhatsApp channel and a phone set to bypass do-not-disturb after repeat calls. Everything else waits for business hours.
For Velardo, creating freedom hasn’t meant doing less by accident. It has meant deliberately building a business that doesn’t require her to do everything.
Systems that support
Velardo is a strong advocate for the TIME mentorship program and has served as its state representative for South Australia since September 2025. It’s easy to see why, she credits the program, and her mentor, with transforming her business almost overnight.
“When I did TIME, it was pretty much after Covid. I applied for a scholarship and didn’t get it the first month. Then I got it the second month, because I didn’t have the money to do it otherwise.”
She was paired with Matt, a business coach from outside the travel industry.
“He just showed me how I could scale the business. I had huge goals of what I wanted to earn, what I wanted to achieve, and during that period I was like, I can’t physically do this on my own.”
The work was concrete: goal-setting, timeframes and building processes she’d never had.
“We had to set really strict goals that I wanted to hit and timeframes – financial, and also how I wanted my business to run, because I didn’t have a lot of systems and processes set up then.”
The hardest part was letting go.
“I realised I can hire staff, and I can let go of things – which was really hard in a business – because I can achieve so much more. I don’t want to book airfares every day. I don’t want to load itineraries, because that’s not my strong point. I want to talk to people.”
In six months, Velardo went from a single admin hire to five full-time staff. She also spent 12 months working with developers to build a custom CRM system around how she actually works.
“I still sit with the clients – I love that part. But I don’t process anything anymore. Very, very little. The team take over the processing and communication, and then I’m there if they need me.”
On AI: opportunity, not itineraries
Velardo uses AI daily across the business, but draws a firm line around where it belongs.
“Itinerary planning is not a great reason to use AI. We’ve tested it a lot, and it makes up fake hotel names, fake restaurants, fake places.”
Where it earns its keep is on the admin side: sorting supplier quotes, drafting communications and social content, and refining the CRM.
“If we get quotes in from suppliers, we used to have to manually go through them – what’s our commission level, where are these itineraries, what includes what. We just upload it into AI now, and in three seconds it spits it out.”
Her message to agents nervous about being replaced is blunt.
“If you don’t start using it, you’re going to get left behind,” she says.
She’s also unbothered by the industry’s favourite anxiety statistic – that only 17 per cent of Australians use a travel agent.
“I have 83 per cent more people that I can get in touch with and get business from. I always try and see the opportunity in it.”
That opportunity, she argues, sharpens rather than shrinks as AI automates more of the transactional side of booking.
“We’re not just processors. We need to build that [relationship] with clients and make sure they’re having the best possible trip ever.”
