And to be fair, neither instance was of the company’s making.
David Diehl, founder of the Dunedin travel agency, tells the story of a client on a group tour to the 2019 NRL grand final in Sydney who was in strife right from the outset.
"He went out on the town on the first night and lost his passport. He wasn’t worried about it because he thought his mates were playing a trick on him," Mr Diehl said.
"We had told him go back to the bars he had been at, but he was off to the races that day. The next day was the grand final and he still didn’t do anything about it, convinced his companions had the passport.
"It wasn’t until that Sunday he was convinced he had lost it and we were due to fly home on the Monday. That was a public holiday in New South Wales so we had to change his flights and extend his accommodation so he could go to the embassy to get an emergency passport.
"That was stressful.
"We always say we’ve left no-one behind but actually we have," he said.
The other absentee on a return flight came in the company’s second year when Boys Trip sent a group of cricket fans to Australia to watch the Black Caps.
"One of them met a girl over there and stayed, so technically we’ve left two behind."
The establishment of Boys Trip in 2006 is a story of mate-ship, disorganisation and a grasping of the nettle.
Mr Diehl, Andre Sintmaartensdyk, Michael Forbes and Mat Hellyer were friends at Dunstan High School in Alexandra in the late 1990s.
For several years after leaving school, they had regularly caught up by way of travelling to a sporting event in Australia. The organisation of those trips generally fell to Mr Diehl and Mr Sintmaartensdyk and that got their friends thinking.
"After a few years of those trips some of the guys in our group raised the potential of there being a market out there for other groups like us who were too busy, too lazy, too disorganised to sort their own trip, so we looked at it," Mr Diehl said.
"The business was launched in April 2006 as a side project. I had just finished studying film and television at the Dunedin campus of Aoraki Polytechnic and I decided to test the market.
"The first clients were a father and son who went to the Melbourne Grand Prix.
"This year we sent 202 fans to Melbourne for the race."
Boys Trip organised three more trips in 2006, including sending a dozen people to Bathurst and about 15 to the Melbourne Cup.
From the 30 clients who travelled that year, the company will this year host more than 700 offshore.
One of the biggest barriers in the early years was gaining the trust of the NRL and Formula One administrations, who were initially sceptical.
"We worked hard to create relationships," Mr Diehl said.
"When you’re only after 15 to 20 tickets, they don’t want a bar of you. Once the numbers grew, they become more interested, and we have set up good partnerships with them.
"Once we established a good case to be an official travel provider for those events, it’s been great.
"The NRL, Formula One and Super Cars people are all terrific to work with," Mr Diehl said.
Mr Sintmaartensdyk joined the company’s payroll in 2009 when tour numbers grew, requiring a hosting component.
Motorsport events and rugby league are the company’s staple.
"When this all started, we thought it would be based around cricket and rugby. But we soon found out that 75% of our trips would be to motorsport events.
"There are cricket and rugby trips and the Melbourne Cup, but motorsport and league is our core," Mr Diehl said.
From establishment to late 2019 the business grew year-on-year — and then Covid hit.
"We had 120 at the Boxing Day test in Melbourne in 2019 and we were set for a bumper 2020.
"There had been a trip to Adelaide in early 2020 and then we had 60 in Melbourne for the Formula One.
"The race was called off on the Friday morning, some clients wanted to come straight home and other half didn’t make a call until the announcement was made in New Zealand about the borders closing at midnight on the Sunday.
Mr Diehl said it had been "frantic" getting everyone home. "Without a doubt that was the most stressful time we’ve had."
Covid had an immediate and long-term impact on the business with a "going from bookings flooding in, to nothing and people wanting their deposits back or asking what was going to happen next".
While business dried up for two years and two staff were made redundant, the trust of clients was a major factor in Boys Trip staying afloat. Many clients left their deposits with the company and were prepared to ride out the effects of the pandemic.
"That was a real show of faith," Mr Diehl said.
As soon as the borders opened in April last year, bookings arrived quickly and in ever-increasing numbers. The reservations for Bathurst 1000 last October were back to what they were pre-Covid.
At present the Singapore Grand Prix is the only event Boys Trip is involved with outside of Australia but there is some consideration about expansion.
"We’ve thought about golf, maybe the Australian Masters in Melbourne. Doing that will mean a different customer base and new partnerships being set up with different governing bodies and ticketing agents. We have thought about it, but we know that the motorsport and league work for us.
"We’re seeing the Melbourne and Singapore Formula One packages getting busier than they have ever been. Maybe Japan is one we would look at."
In a perfect world, Mr Diehl said taking groups to more Formula One races would be a plan.
"The Miami race would be a good one to do and going to the Super Bowl would be a dream event."
While bookings continue to grow, of special pride to Mr Diehl and Mr Sintmaartensdyk is the number of return clients they have. Craig Hepburn, who lives in Waikanae, has been on 18 motorsport trips with the company and most of this year’s reservations comprise return clients or those referred by previous travellers.
Boys Trip has also successfully taken on the country’s larger travel providers with the 204 clients hosted at the 2018 Bathurst race surpassing Williment Travel’s 160.
Mr Diehl said, apart from sending the father and son on that first-ever trip in 2006, his favourite memory was hosting 120 clients at the 2019 Boxing Day cricket test at the MCG.
"Cricket Australia initially declined us as a travel provider, and I had to go back to them and say we’ve had more than 300 people inquiring. We will have a decent group go over.
"They were worried we’d only have 20 or so from one cricket club. To end up with 120 was great and we could have had more but we ran out of flights. It was awesome being there on that first morning and seeing our tour group there. That was cool," he said.
As well as enjoying the clients’ reaction to having the likes of Nigel Vagana, Scott Styris, David Coulthard and Greg Murphy as their hosts, Mr Diehl also recalls a special trip in 2013.
"We had a lady who wanted to organise a surprise trip to Bathurst for her partner’s milestone birthday. He had always wanted to go. You hear this story all the time, guys sitting around watching Bathurst and saying, ‘We’ve got to get over there one day’. Another year rolls around and they still haven’t done it.
"This group had been talking about it for 10 years. So, this lady decides she’ll surprise him. She got his mates involved and he had no idea. They knocked on his door and told him to pack his bags as we’re all off to the airport. He had no idea until he saw they were on a flight to Sydney and then worked it out.
"He had such a great time, he’s booked with us every year since."
Boys Trip has six staff. Mr Diehl and Christina Lamb are full-time in the Dunedin office and are joined at various times during the week by Mr Sintmaartensdyk and part-time office administrator, Taylah Oxley. Mr Forbes and Mr Hellyer are shareholders and occasional tour hosts and are based in Wellington.
Ms Lamb completed a bachelor of applied management at Victoria University in Wellington and Otago Polytechnic this year, having started work at Boys Trip in May 2022.
As part of her studies, she undertook a research project on the perception of the business, concentrating on the name.
"I looked at the name and how that might impact people’s decisions to book and also looked into the conversion rate from inquiries to bookings, which had never been researched," Ms Lamb said.
"We all thought the name might be a negative, but the findings showed that everyone thought Boys Trip was a great name. They associated it with a good brand and offered trips people wanted to go on.
"It’s certainly not a female-exclusive company. We get a lot of female inquiries and from a lot of couples with the females doing the bookings."
Ms Lamb said the Boys Trip conversion rate from inquiring to booking sat at 69%.
The company’s net promoter score, a benchmark all travel agencies use to ask how likely their clients are to recommend their services to friends and colleagues, is 78%, well above the travel sector average of 54%.
