How Cat Jones set up a no-flight travel company in lockdown

No flights, just trains and buses and bikes, this is what Byway are trying to do, the enjoyment coming not so much with the destination but how you get there, writes Andy Martin

Cat Jones, building Byway in lockdown (Byway)

It is March 2020. Lockdown has just kicked in. No one is going anywhere. What do you say to yourself? “I know, why don’t I start a travel company!” Only, perhaps, if you are Cat Jones. “A lot of people told me I was mad,” she says.

But there was a method to her madness. Her brainchild, travel start-up Byway, specialises in “slow travel”: no flights, nothing but trains and buses and bikes – or walking, if you prefer. She will take you as far as Corsica, but the emphasis is on the not so far-flung pleasures of the West Country, Wales, Yorkshire and the Scottish isles.

Cat Jones was born in Cambridge, but her dad was a civil engineer and their travels took them to Yemen and Zimbabwe before she came back to England to go to school in Devon in a village with one pub and a post office. Now she organises trips down that way. She studied physics at Durham but had a boyfriend in Oxford and used to commute between the two cities. Only by train. “My parents owned a car,” she says. “But not me. It was always trains.”

Jones likes to jog (she used to run half-marathons) and sail and ride a bike. From time to time she hops on a ferry. Or paddles a kayak. She would only need to incorporate hot air balloons into her itinerary to be a 21st-century Phileas Fogg, hero of Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days. She is not queuing up to get on SpaceX.

An internship with Accenture once took her as far as Thailand and Johannesburg. On her gap year, she went across South America, from Peru to Rio di Janeiro, on buses. She once spent 36 hours on a bus, somewhere in Ecuador. Cat Jones is, in effect, a poster-child for slow travel.

I’ve always been a slow traveller. It’s the mindset. I like getting to know a place – not staying in a chain hotel – experiencing a place as it really is

After a trip of several months around Malaysia in 2009, she and her boyfriend (now husband) launched a “micro travel company”, organising trips around South America. “We learned how difficult it is to found a company,” she says. She worked for Unruly for ten years then went to Founders Factory, where she was working on creating and supporting new businesses. “It was like training wheels for me,” she says. Now Unruly and Founders Factory have come in as angel investors in Byway.

“I’ve always been a slow traveller. It’s the mindset. I like getting to know a place – not staying in a chain hotel – experiencing a place as it really is. Combined with sustainability.” While having her first child, Jones had managed to fit in a masters at SOAS in sustainable development, which chimed in with her study of climate change at Durham. “It all added on to my thinking about the slow way of travelling. It’s more connected, it’s more gorgeous, and it’s flight-free.”

While having her first child, Jones managed to fit in a masters at SOAS in sustainable development (Byway)

And that was even before the dreaded word Covid had been uttered. When the pandemic hit, and no one could travel, Jones asked herself, “When people can travel again, what will they want? My bet was they’ll want slow travel, no flights, no fast cars, and closer to home.” She watched Boris Johnson announce the first lockdown on television and then went and handed in her notice. It was a courageous leap of faith. “If ever there was a time for slow travel, it’s now,” she says, with sublime confidence. She was prophetic and while the travel industry has hit the buffers, Byway has (to use a non-Byway sort of metaphor) taken off. They built up a big waiting list and now nobody is waiting any more.

You could call slow travel more ethical travel too, but Jones insists it’s more feel-good than do-good: “Slow travel exists not because you ought to do it, but because it’s more fun.” Yet the reality is that rail travel is reckoned to produce only 14gm of CO2 per passenger mile compared with air’s 285gm. Which explains why Byway was awarded a grant of £100k from Innovate UK’s Sustainable Innovation Fund.

Byway by train in Switzerland (@davidmarcu)

“Without Covid it would have been hard to sell this kind of holiday,” says Cat. Post-lockdown, you still have to ask yourself, now more than ever: do I really want to get on that plane? The “romance” of flying is dead. Wouldn’t it be better to travel through a place rather than fly over it, emitting great clouds of fossil fuels as you go? Let the train take the strain – and reduce your carbon footprint – even in Corsica. Or hire a kayak on Loch Lomond: it’s good exercise too. Cat Jones says she hasn’t even had to do any marketing, the force of the logic has been so persuasive in itself. “We’ve been working at full capacity.” And they have nothing but five-star reviews on Trustpilot.

There are still only eight people working at Byway (the “lean team”), but they were good enough to send me a sample itinerary that would take me slowly around North Wales, by bus and train and bike, taking in great ruined castles, misty mountains and beautiful beaches – punctuated by irresistible eateries along the way. Jones also thought I might like to try a certain amount of “wild swimming” in waterfalls and hilltop lakes. All very tempting, but having recently taken the plunge in the bracing waters of Pembrokeshire, I reckon next time I might consider packing a wetsuit.

@andymartinink