The company

Griffin is the global market leader in the provision of specialist travel services to the marine, offshore and cruise industries, arranging travel for crews rotating onto merchant ships, to oil and gas hubs and to cruise ships. The business was founded in 1977 and has since expanded to deliver over £300m p.a. of travel services from 31 strategically located offices.

Griffin’s customers rely on it to get their crews to their destinations, on time, worldwide. These crew members are often involved in high-value applications, where being a day late would disrupt voyage schedules or obligatory crew rotations with major cost implications. Griffin’s global resources and experience at manoeuvring large multi-national crews at short notice, with complex routing and visa requirements, have resulted in long term customer relationships and strong market share growth.

Griffin provides a completely outsourced service, enabling clients to eliminate the fixed cost of an in-house travel desk, whilst delivering a much more sophisticated offering. Its position as the largest global provider enables it to offer the best possible fares to its customers and often find availability that others cannot, particularly to some of the more far-flung locations that are important to its oil and gas and marine customers.

The investment

John Hartz, Christian Hamilton, Gareth Healy and Andrew Leek led the transaction on behalf of Inflexion. Christian Hamilton and Gareth Healy will join Griffin’s Board of Directors. As part of the transaction, Dick Porter, former CEO of STA Travel will join Griffin as non-executive Chairman.

The investment is partly structured to allow the buyout of the estate of a deceased founder investor and partly to realign the equity interests of the ongoing management team.

Inflexion-managed funds have invested £11million, taking a highly structured 25% equity holding. Management have also invested substantially and a package of £22m debt facilities were provided by HSBC.

The Inflexion difference

Inflexion’s strong track record of helping create robust, professional management structures for fast growing businesses, international experience and its deep expertise in all the business sectors relevant to Griffin, made it an attractive partner for the management team as they seek to move onto the next stage of growth. Inflexion has also provided expertise in debt structuring and foreign exchange optimisation to construct a highly advantageous balance sheet structure to boost returns whilst minimising risk.