PEOPLE who run holiday businesses seldom take time off. Their children tell stories of snatched breaks, cancelled flights or hours spent sitting by the pool in an exotic location with dad in a darkened apartment doing deals on a mobile phone.

After Martin Skelly, the managing director of Navan Travel, took the helm of his father’s business at 24, he did not take a holiday for many years. Things changed only when he went to a meeting of the Irish Travel Agents Association and a group of airline executives, who were chatting about their holiday plans, berated him when he said he took none. Since then, Skelly and his family have taken two weeks in the south of France each summer.

Like his father, a retired civil servant who ran Navan Travel in the 1970s, Skelly has built his success out of catering for the travel needs of his local community. For decades, the firm sold sun packages to local families and made travel plans for indigenous companies, particularly the furniture manufacturers for which the area was known. The business grew steadily in volume and ambition until, by 2000, it was employing 16 people.

Then the bottom fell out of the travel world. Corporate travel was slashed after September 11 and the internet, waiting in the wings, rose up to take a giant bite out of the bread-and-butter business of most travel agents. Airlines could sell direct to the customer across the internet or via a telesales operation.

With Ryanair and easyJet selling more than 90% of flights across the internet, agents’ commissions have collapsed from 9% to 1%.

“Effectively, our suppliers have become our competitors,” says Skelly, who has net margins of about 2% which is at the top end of the industry average. “One thing is clear, in this business you won’t survive by continuing to do what you have always done.”

As if this wasn’t bad enough, many local furniture manufacturers contracted out their manufacturing operations to focus on retail instead. There was no longer the same need to organise trips abroad to trade fairs for large groups of people and their equipment. Skelly has seen corporate travel decline from 30% to 10% of his business.

“We don’t expect it to pick up,” he says. “Companies are just travelling differently now. Monthly meetings happen on a bimonthly basis. One person goes instead of two. And they might travel economy instead of business class.”

It is a testament to Skelly’s skill and energy that he has managed to grow his business through such testing times. With growth of 10-20% a year for many years, he reached sales of ¤7.8m last year. Despite a bleak period after September 11 when staff worked a half-day week for two months in the interests of ensuring that the business would stay profitable that year, he employs 14 people, most of whom have been with the company for years.

Skelly has been a beneficiary of Navan’s increased population, which has doubled in the past few years and is set to double again. He has driven growth through three main sectors: long-haul package holidays, which the firm either buys from big tour operators or designs itself; the visiting-friends-and-relations market; and city breaks or short trips.

“It used to be that people took one main summer holiday each year,” says Skelly. “But now we have ‘leisure snacking’ where people might expect two to four holidays a year, some of them for just a few days.” Skelly will continue to exploit this market.

He is also determined to differentiate himself by developing specialist niche products in-house. For some years now he has been organising bridge tournaments in Malta, Greece and the Canaries for a more mature population, many of them women, drawn from across Ireland. Skelly forms relationships with five-star hotels and checks out the details in advance.