harridge travel

In challenging times, expert advice is more important than ever. As the travel sector adapts to Covid-19, Harridge Group is here for its clients, providing the very best customer service as we navigate this new environment together.

From single bookings to multi-sector itineraries, harridge provides efficient, reliable, and cost-effective business travel management that is unrivalled in quality and backed by 40 years of industry-leading experience., we provide every client with two dedicated travel consultants with an average experience of 15 years and a 24-hour support line. when you call us, you will speak to someone who knows you., as partner member of the uk’s largest travel management consortium, our clients benefit from a £3 billion buying power along with exclusively negotiated travel rates and cost savings of up to 30%., family run and owned for 40 years. our commitment to clients is unmatched. we take care of everything, from booking your preferred seat on-board to the exact location of your hotel..

Harridge Response

1 hour response time for all quotes foc 24 hour emergency assistance Calls answered within 3-5 rings Traveller tracking, duty of care for all and responsive emergency assistance

Harridge Guarantee

Tailored personal service Experienced dedicated consultants Travel risk advice

Harridge Quality

Access to negotiated net fares Duty of care proactive management and offerings ISO 9001 & 27001 Full trip management and complex itinerary planning

Harridge Solutions

Proactive Account management of travel budgets, green travel & Well-being policies Proactive searches to quality check fares & rates Carbon off-setting reporting included in client dashboard Off-setting plans produced and certified

Harridge Family

Family owned and run for 40 years All family members work in the business Family philosophy and ethos throughout the business

Low fees and price matching

• Amongst the lowest fees in the industry
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• Price matching to ensure the best fare

A PA’s best friend

We enhance your team, working alongside you to deliver cost-saving, flexible and straight-forward travel management solutions.

• Check-in online and boarding passes
• 24/7 dedicated account manager
• VIP services available, such as limousine transfers and helicopter bookings

Event management

Harridge can also book rooms and venues for meetings, conferences, and other company events, here or abroad. We have access to the lowest rates and exclusive availabilities.

• Book a room or venue for meetings
• Book team building venues
• Access lower rates and exclusive availabilities

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Meaningful account management

We don’t just book flights, hotels and transfers. As part of our free consultancy service, we also analyse your travel expenditure and identify opportunities to optimise savings. Meaningful quarterly meetings and reports show you exactly where Harridge is saving you money.

• Quarterly review meetings
• Corporate supplier negotiation
• Tailored reports

Marine travel

Marine travel is distinct from other forms of business travel. We offer continued adaptation and applied specialist knowledge. We make the complex straight-forward whilst managing security risks. We offer businesses working within the marine, offshore and energy sectors travel solutions 24/7/365, globally.

• Marine fares
• 24 hour team available
• Knowledge and experience

Risk management

We help companies working in emerging markets and unstable environments protect employees and discover external factors that could effect their business.

• Travel risk advice and preparation
• Traveller assistance
• Traveller tracking and support

ISO 9001:2015 & ISO 27001:2017

ISO 27001:2017 is a specification for an information security management system. This includes all legal, physical and technical controls involved in our risk management processes.

The benefits of certification to ISO 27001 include:

• Increased reliability and security of systems and information
• Improved customer and business partner confidence
• Increased business resilience
• Alignment with customer requirements
• Improved management processes and integration with corporate risk strategies

We work to an ISO 9001:2015 international standard.

ISO 9001:2015 is a standard based upon the continual improvement of management principles, including a strong customer focus, the implementation of top management and the process approach.

• Fares checking
• Process procedure checking
• Invoice report checking

Harridge Business Travel

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From single bookings to multi-sector itineraries, Harridge provides efficient, reliable, and cost-effective business travel management that is unrivalled in quality and backed by 35 years of industry-leading experience.

Are you a people person with an interest in business travel? Harridge is one of the UK’s top 50 independent travel management companies.

We offer a competitive salary and benefits package, and full, ongoing support in your personal development. In an industry with high levels of staff turnover, our account managers have been with us, on average, for over eight years.

Whether you’re a seasoned travel professional or just starting out, we’d like to hear from you.

Send your CV to  [email protected] , or by post to: Careers, Harridge, 118 South Ealing Road, London, W5 4QJ.

Send your CV to [email protected] ,

or post to:

Careers Harridge 118 South Ealing Road London W5 4QJ

Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza gets a new owner with plans to modernize the center

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Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza, a regional mall that has served the South Los Angeles community for many decades, has been sold to a local developer who plans to transform the struggling center into a more modern complex with housing, offices, stores and restaurants.

The deal, valued at more than $140 million, ended a contentious sale process that lasted nearly two years and saw other would-be buyers drop out in the face of pressure from a group of neighborhood activists who hoped to acquire the property themselves and develop it as a community-owned project.

For the record:

8:36 p.m. Aug. 25, 2021 A previous version of this article referred to Brenda Ashby as Barbara Ashby.

Harridge Development Group bought the mall from a Chicago private equity fund for about $111 million, said David Schwartzman, chief executive of Harridge. His company also bought the Macy’s department store building in the mall in a separate transaction of more than $30 million with Macy’s Inc., he said, giving Harridge control of almost the entire 42-acre site that straddles Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard at Crenshaw Boulevard.

Schwarzman said he plans to start building housing on a parking lot near an Albertsons grocery store within a year and a half and move on to other additions and improvements while keeping the mall operating. The entire project will cost about $1 billion including the purchase price, he said, and could take as long as seven years.

“It’s an iconic piece of property with a tremendous amount of cultural significance,” he said. “The area is going through a huge revitalization and we think this is an amazing opportunity to do a mix of housing, retail and office all in one location.”

Contributing to revitalization in the area is a light-rail line under construction that will connect the Crenshaw neighborhood to the region’s Metro train system by next year and include an underground stop at the mall.

Column One: ‘This mall has been devastated.’ A lean Christmas, empty stores and an unsettling future

The pending sale of the Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza has left mall tenants wondering what new ownership will mean. But first, they have to make it through the pandemic.

Dec. 22, 2020

Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza traces its roots to 1947 with the opening of two department stores, complemented by shops and restaurants. In the 1980s, Mayor Tom Bradley wanted to see a major shopping center in the neighborhood and encouraged linking the stores to create an indoor mall that was completed in 1988.

Previous owners finished a $35-million upgrade in 2012 that included a new food court, 15-screen theater complex and other improvements in an effort to pump more life into the mall.

Indoor malls have often struggled in recent years as their department store anchors fell out of favor with many shoppers who increasingly bought products online or went to outdoor “lifestyle” centers that mixed food and entertainment with shopping. The pandemic proved to be another blow for Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza as wary shoppers stayed home.

The mall lost Walmart, one of its main drivers of foot traffic, in 2016 as part of the company’s global downsizing. Three years later, Sears closed. Macy’s will stay on as a tenant for the time being, Schwartzman said, but “I think eventually they are going to leave.”

Schwartzman plans to convert the department stores to other uses such as a vocational school or offices, as is being done in other locations such as the Westside Pavilion in Los Angeles, where the indoor mall and a former Macy’s building are being turned into offices for firms in creative fields such as Google. San Fernando Valley stalwart Sherman Oaks Galleria has been a mix of offices and retail for nearly two decades.

“We feel these are very interesting adaptive reuse opportunities,” Schwartzman said of the department stores. “They’re amazing locations for that.”

Harridge‘s makeover could create a new model for the mall, in which small shops and restaurants get support from residents and office workers instead of department stores.

Schwartzman hopes to keep all current tenants while emphasizing local businesses over national chain stores going forward. Among the well-known local businesses now are Southern Girl Desserts, Post & Beam restaurant and Malik Books.

How L.A.’s indie bookstores survived the worst of the pandemic

After a brutal year of economic uncertainty, booksellers in L.A. are expecting a full recovery. But the June 15 reopening is reigniting safety concerns.

June 16, 2021

“We think retail trends are shifting and the mall can be more local in the future,” he said, “with small business starting out, and food experiences” that make it a more inviting place to spend time.

The mall site received city approvals in 2018 for an additional net 2 million square feet of new development including apartments, condominiums, a 400-room hotel, new office space and additional stores, which increased its desirability to developers.

Harridge will build the approved 961 housing units with a mix of condominiums and apartments. Schwartzman said 10% of the condos will be sold at below-market rates as “workforce” housing for people with middle-income jobs such as teaching and nursing who wouldn’t otherwise be able to buy a place in the area. Apartments will also have subsidized units, with 5% rented to tenants who qualify as low-income and another 5% for very-low-income tenants.

Harridge was among multiple bidders for the mall, including one who hoped to create a movie studio on the site.

In 2020, Los Angeles developer CIM Group announced that it had agreed to buy the property, but it soon faced opposition from a group of neighborhood activists who feared CIM’s office-centric plans would bring unwelcome gentrification to the neighborhood. Downtown Crenshaw wanted the mall to be sold to a community coalition that raised money to enter the bidding while activists pressured CIM and the sellers to back out of the deal in escrow, which CIM did.

The sellers next selected New York real estate companies Livwrk and DFH Partners to buy the mall, but they also backed out while facing opposition from activists whose pressure tactics included demonstrating in Livwrk founder Asher Abehsera’s Los Angeles neighborhood and launching a campaign to tie him with Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

Schwartzman was attacked by opponents of the sale as a “racist gentrifier” and his financial partner Leonard Blavatnik, who owns Warner Music Group, was labeled “a crony of Putin.”

After the sale closed, Schwartzman called such personal denunciations untrue and “a lot of noise” that he wants to put in the past.

“There have been so many false starts in this area, we just want to come in and deliver something that the neighborhood and the city of Los Angeles are proud of and happy to visit,” he said.

Schwartzman said he met with homeowners and community groups including Downtown Crenshaw leadership and concluded that most people would like to see a project that “revitalizes the mall, preserves retail, creates housing and creates jobs.”

The mall has taken a financial hit from COVID-19 and needs help, said Brenda Ashby, a representative of the Crenshaw Manor Community Assn. homeowners’ group.

“We are very happy to see the sale close because it would be an economic come-up for us to get businesses back open, people back to work,” she said. “We are looking forward to all of that.”

Neighborhood homeowner activist John Gonzales said Harridge appears to have the resources and track record to take on a project of such a large scope.

“As we have watched the mall continue to decay, we feel like it’s in serious danger of closing,” Gonzales said. ”We want somebody in there who can stop the bleeding.”

Schwartzman noted that he has built 6,000 homes in the last 25 years, including residences at Grace Park in Inglewood and Ponte Vista in San Pedro.

Harridge is also set to develop the Crossroads Hollywood mixed-use project with 950 apartments, retail space and a hotel that opponents fought as unwelcome gentrification that would displace working families. The city approved the project in 2019 and work is set to begin on it next year.

For work at Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza, Schwartzman said he would follow an existing development agreement for the site that includes using union construction labor, contracting with minority- and female-owned businesses and hiring workers from the nearby community.

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Harridge Group by Igloo

Opinion by Richard Baird Posted 8 October 2013

Harridge , formerly Ealing Travel Services, is a corporate travel group made up of Harridge Business Travel, Harridge Luxury and Harridge Events. London-based design studio Igloo  were recently commissioned to design the group’s visual identity and brand architecture which would reference its “significant history and experience”. Their design solution, a combination of serif detail, sans-serif characters and a modern colour palette and pattern set, drawing on what Igloo describe as upper-class English culture, mixes a sense of heritage with corporate quality in a clear and concise way.

“The new identity employs typefaces Gill Sans and Joanna, hoping to quickly and directly suggest a sense of Englishness, which is a key part of how the company sees itself. A set of eight striped patterns support this idea, recalling aspects of English heritage and culture, particularly the aesthetic of upper-class college ties and cricket/rowing blazers in ‘ club colours ’.”

“In an industry that suffers from a poverty of unique, effective design, the work done for Harridge —in its approach to visuals and typography, UI design and code— aims to position the company as a major player in the corporate travel industry.” –  Igloo

Although I am not keen on the aesthetic of the mark and type it is difficult to really question their communicative effectiveness. The tall H character, its traditional serifs, the modern spin of replacing its bar with the company’s EST date and the practical sensibilities of a well-spaced, uppercase, humanist sans-serif (a choice that has significant heritage of its own and a close association with the way finding efficiency of rail infrastructure of the early 20th century), achieves a solid balance between experience and contemporary reliability. The pattern and colour palette, executed in print as an edge to edge detail across the stationery, also manages to draw from the past but manages to work it in with a more recent sense of energy and style.

Discover more

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Claudia Looi

Touring the Top 10 Moscow Metro Stations

By Claudia Looi 2 Comments

Komsomolskaya metro station looks like a museum. It has vaulted ceilings and baroque decor.

Hidden underground, in the heart of Moscow, are historical and architectural treasures of Russia. These are Soviet-era creations – the metro stations of Moscow.

Our guide Maria introduced these elaborate metro stations as “the palaces for the people.” Built between 1937 and 1955, each station holds its own history and stories. Stalin had the idea of building beautiful underground spaces that the masses could enjoy. They would look like museums, art centers, concert halls, palaces and churches. Each would have a different theme. None would be alike.

The two-hour private tour was with a former Intourist tour guide named Maria. Maria lived in Moscow all her life and through the communist era of 60s to 90s. She has been a tour guide for more than 30 years. Being in her 60s, she moved rather quickly for her age. We traveled and crammed with Maria and other Muscovites on the metro to visit 10 different metro stations.

Arrow showing the direction of metro line 1 and 2

Moscow subways are very clean

To Maria, every street, metro and building told a story. I couldn’t keep up with her stories. I don’t remember most of what she said because I was just thrilled being in Moscow.   Added to that, she spilled out so many Russian words and names, which to one who can’t read Cyrillic, sounded so foreign and could be easily forgotten.

The metro tour was the first part of our all day tour of Moscow with Maria. Here are the stations we visited:

1. Komsomolskaya Metro Station  is the most beautiful of them all. Painted yellow and decorated with chandeliers, gold leaves and semi precious stones, the station looks like a stately museum. And possibly decorated like a palace. I saw Komsomolskaya first, before the rest of the stations upon arrival in Moscow by train from St. Petersburg.

2. Revolution Square Metro Station (Ploshchad Revolyutsii) has marble arches and 72 bronze sculptures designed by Alexey Dushkin. The marble arches are flanked by the bronze sculptures. If you look closely you will see passersby touching the bronze dog's nose. Legend has it that good luck comes to those who touch the dog's nose.

Touch the dog's nose for good luck. At the Revolution Square station

Revolution Square Metro Station

3. Arbatskaya Metro Station served as a shelter during the Soviet-era. It is one of the largest and the deepest metro stations in Moscow.

Arbatskaya Metro Station

4. Biblioteka Imeni Lenina Metro Station was built in 1935 and named after the Russian State Library. It is located near the library and has a big mosaic portrait of Lenin and yellow ceramic tiles on the track walls.

Lenin's portrait at the Biblioteka Imeni Lenina Metro Station

5. Kievskaya Metro Station was one of the first to be completed in Moscow. Named after the capital city of Ukraine by Kiev-born, Nikita Khruschev, Stalin's successor.

Kievskaya Metro Station

6. Novoslobodskaya Metro Station  was built in 1952. It has 32 stained glass murals with brass borders.

Novoslobodskaya metro station

7. Kurskaya Metro Station was one of the first few to be built in Moscow in 1938. It has ceiling panels and artwork showing Soviet leadership, Soviet lifestyle and political power. It has a dome with patriotic slogans decorated with red stars representing the Soviet's World War II Hall of Fame. Kurskaya Metro Station is a must-visit station in Moscow.

Ceiling panel and artworks at Kurskaya Metro Station

8. Mayakovskaya Metro Station built in 1938. It was named after Russian poet Vladmir Mayakovsky. This is one of the most beautiful metro stations in the world with 34 mosaics painted by Alexander Deyneka.

Mayakovskaya station

One of the over 30 ceiling mosaics in Mayakovskaya metro station

9. Belorusskaya Metro Station is named after the people of Belarus. In the picture below, there are statues of 3 members of the Partisan Resistance in Belarus during World War II. The statues were sculpted by Sergei Orlov, S. Rabinovich and I. Slonim.

10. Teatralnaya Metro Station (Theatre Metro Station) is located near the Bolshoi Theatre.

Teatralnaya Metro Station decorated with porcelain figures .

Taking the metro's escalator at the end of the tour with Maria the tour guide.

Have you visited the Moscow Metro? Leave your comment below.

January 15, 2017 at 8:17 am

An excellent read! Thanks for much for sharing the Russian metro system with us. We're heading to Moscow in April and exploring the metro stations were on our list and after reading your post, I'm even more excited to go visit them. Thanks again 🙂

December 6, 2017 at 10:45 pm

Hi, do you remember which tour company you contacted for this tour?

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