About Us - Meet the Team
Experience Travel began when the founders fell in love with Sri Lanka in 1999.
Since then we have gone from strength to strength and have grown into the Experience Travel Group featuring Vietnam, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Burma and Indonesia.
Our philosophy has not changed. In the first place we believe we need to offer clients more than they can find out themselves on the internet. We’ll then concentrate on old fashioned values of highly personalised service to ensure you get the holiday experience you want.
Our UK based consultants have lived in, visited and know our areas inside out. Our website is the most comprehensive in the business and we offer a unique service in that we have specialist offices for client support in London, Sri Lanka and Thailand.
In the UK and overseas, our team is our most valuable asset - so read on to find out more!
Lyria Eastley
Lyria has lived in Cambodia, writing for the Phnom Penh Post, and worked for a year with the Korean Embassy organising travel for film crews. She speaks Burmese, Khmer and Thai, which she took up as extra subjects while studying at The School of Oriental and African Studies in London. Her main subject at university though was South East Asia - she is passionate about this region and its extraordinary history and culture.
Lyria has spent a large amount of time in Thailand, for which she has a great passion. She has also explored southern Laos in some depth. Most recently she visited Burma and came back to London bubbling with excitement. She will gladly talk the ears off anyone willing to listen to her (informed) rambles about Burmese history, culture, language and politics. Have a read of the tours she designed in Burma here.
For a small person, Lyria can eat a great deal and knows a disturbing amount about Thai food. If you don't belive us, check out our Facebook page...
Matt Brazier
Matt loves everything about travel, and he’s had the bug since his first gap year in 2004. He started his career in adventure tourism, working for one of the UK’s leading adventure travel tour operators; helping to organise trips all over the world. After some serious trekking and climbing peaks, he’s decided to take the softer approach to travel and over the last few years has focused a lot of his travel around South East Asia - which is where he specialises for us now. Ask him his favourite country there and he’ll start telling you that it’s not possible to choose as they all have their own unique quirks and qualities. A boring answer so our advice is: don't ask!
Matt has developed a taste for the finer things in life since joining Experience Travel (we think he may now be a little spoilt), and took a whistle stop tour of Sri Lanka, staying in some of the best hotels on the Island. His latest trip was a three week ‘classic’ trip from north to south of Vietnam, taking in all the key sites, hotels and experiences and he particularly loved experiencing the Bassac Cruise for the first time. His top tip for a great value but superb little hotel is the Ancient House in Hoi An.
Although Borneo is not on our website as it is not a specialist area, Matt knows this region very well, and he has organised trips for a few repeat Experience Travel clients, focussing around Sarawak and Sabah.
Sam Clark
Sam is one of the founders of Experience Travel and spent two years in Sri Lanka researching and developing the distinct Experience Travel feel - a process which was interrupted by the Asia Tsunami of 2004 following which the Experience Travel team became ‘Aid Sri Lanka’ for 6 months.
Sam’s background is in travel – he was a sales manager at the now defunct Quest Travel as well as working for the Lotus Group – but became frustrated with the predictable product offered for tailor-made travel in Asia and thought there might be a better way with a true regional specialist. Asia has always been a feature of Sam’s life – from back-packing round India as a 19 year old, to meeting his Kiwi wife on a beach in in Thailand. More recently he has travelled with his wife and children to various places in Asia and considers himself something of an expert in long haul travel with kids. His top tip is a two bedroom villa at Koyao Island Resort. Now THAT is family down time...
Sam’s specialist subject is being tall in Asia: his 6’7 frame is noticeable in the UK, but faintly ridiculous in short-statured Asia. There is barely a door frame on which he hasn’t struck his head throughout the region and the story of how he accidentally knocked a house down has been told and re-told until it has become almost a legend in Sri Lanka.
Melissa Nicholas
Melissa’s interest in travel is a consequence of growing up in Shropshire when everything in life seemed to be happening a million miles away! We have yet to find something that Melissa does not know about planes, airports, flight routes and airlines in general.
Her passion for South East Asia started on a gap year trip in the 90s. She’s managed 12 subsequent visits since then, travelled extensively throughout the region and stayed in everything from tents and humble beach bungalows to luxury hotels. She joined Experience Travel early on and launched Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam as destinations – bringing with her her considerable expertise in this region.
Melissa recently became a mother butshe says it won’t stand in the way of her travel and is now responsible for ensuring that what we offer is absolutely the best, most varied and most interesting holidays in the business. She is passionate and tenacious about making this happen!
Nick Clark
Nick is Experience Travel’s Sales Manager and our pre-eminent Sri Lankan specialist. When not obsessing over his other passion, sport, Nick loves exploring life in Asia and has spent a great deal of time in Cambodia, Indonesia, Thailand and Laos over the past decade.
Recent adventures have included a comprehensive ‘recce’ of the forgotten nooks and crannies of southern Cambodia, an exploration of the little known Mannar Island in north-west Sri Lanka, a hotel inspection visit to the Maldives and exhaustive tours of Bali (twice), Java, Flores (and Indonesian Borneo). What a life!
Harriet Reeves
Harriet has been exploring the world since the young age of 13. Just as importantly for us, she has a degree in Ecology and worked for a Cheetah Conservation in Botswana for a year - living in the middle of the Kalahari Desert in a garden shed(!).
Having trained as an ecologist and with a passion for wildlife conservation, Harriet is Experience Travel’s Nature and Wildlife specialist. She believes that tourism and wildlife conservation can help each other when carried out correctly, so keeps a fierce eye on all of our nature and wildlife activities to make sure they are up to scratch. Having worked for an NGO in Botswana researching ways for humans and wildlife to live together without conflict, she knows what she is talking about!
Harriet has travelled extensively throughout South East Asia, North America, Australasia and Africa. As part of her training for Experience Travel she spent an intensive 6 weeks in Sri Lanka covering each experience and hotel that we offer. It may have made her friends jealous – but we know what hard work this really is!
Alice Bayly
Alice cut her teeth in the travel business in the early 1990s at a Moroccan specialist tour operator; an upmarket but rather archaic company that did business with a typewriter and a telex machine but taught her all about the value of personal service from experts in their field. After a misguided foray into banking, from which escape was only possible via a year’s sailing around the Caribbean and South American coast, Alice saw sense and has worked in travel ever since. Not wanting family life to restrict her own explorations she took her daughter on her first ‘work’ trip when she was a year old - her opinions on the family friendliness of island-hopping in the Seychelles proved invaluable! More recently though, juggling full-on sales and management with young children proved too much and so Alice was delighted to discover that Experience Travel were looking for someone to run their ticketing department on a part-time basis – not to mention that they specialised in some countries she hadn’t been to yet! Off to check out how Laos and Vietnam work with a 7 and 9 year old this year….
Tom Armstrong
Tom first fell in love with Sri Lanka in 1999 whilst on a voluntary teaching placement in rural Anamaduwa, a place he can now call home. As well as being one of the founders of Experience Travel he is one of the proud owners of a jungle lodge called The Mudhouse. An expert on all things Sri Lankan, Tom speaks fluent Sinhala, wobbles his head almost perfectly and likes nothing more than exploring Sri Lanka by motorbike – a mode of transport that he has used to visit every district in the country.
Tom has spent the last few years living in Thailand working out of our Bangkok office and has travelled extensively throughout Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam and more recently, Burma. He is Experience Travel’s chief scout and loves unearthing Asia’s hidden gems and thinking of ways to improve our in-country experience.
Particular favourites include the Badulla district of Sri Lanka, Phu Quoc Island, the city streets of Hanoi, the Mekong Delta inVietnam and the mountains, people and beer of Laos. Tom is passionate about Asian food and can’t stay away from Bangkok and Thai and Isarn cuisine for too long. His favourite hotel is The Sarojin and he tends to judge every hotel by thier superlative standards.
Mick Lowe
Mick has been involved with Experience Travel since the idea was first discussed many years ago on a trip to Sri Lanka to meet up with Tom and Sam – who were living there at the time. Mick has been a director since the company was first incorporated and has supported its growth since 2002, sitting on the board, playing an active part in guiding strategy, recruitment and maintaining standards.
In his day job Mick owns a niche management consultancy, LCS Limited, working with larger organisations on change management and performance improvement. Mostly UK based, Mick has also consulted in Bangladesh, West Bengal and South Africa and is currently leading a change programme in Albania where tourism has not yet begun.
Mick is an avid traveller with only one continent still to visit. He is a fan of both India and southern Sri Lanka recently staying over in the Makunudu Resort. Mick has always loved the Mudhouse from his very first visit when the first hut was just a few feet off the ground! More recently, Mick stayed at Kingsley Pearl south of Galle and just fell in love with the property itself and the staff who run it. A very individual experience in a tranquil setting that is not far from some of the nicest beaches on the island including the idyllic Mirissa.
