Travelling man

Amar Latif is an entrepreneur who founded Traveleyes, a company that specialises in holidays for visually impaired and sighted travellers. He talks about changing career, and allowing blind people to see the world

I'm founder and director of Traveleyes; we’re an international tour operator that enables blind travellers to travel the world independent of their family. It’s an organisation that enables sighted travellers to come on board and act as the eyes for blind travellers, and have a different experience.

In terms of what I do, I’m a director of the company. It involves overlooking my staff and creating new markets. It also involves working on strategy and where the business is going to go.

As an entrepreneur you basically have to deal with everything, the buck stops with you. From cleaning the office to IT problems, marketing and branding to product creation – in our case creating new and compelling holiday itineraries, all over the world.

At the moment our customer base is international, we have travellers all over the world.

We have travellers from the UK but we get lots of travellers from different countries, so it also means being aware of regulations in all of those countries.

Working in the travel industry was something that just came about.

My background was a degree in maths, stats and finance and then I trained and qualified as an accountant in a large telecommunications company and was involved in lots of
different roles; the last role I had there was as a finance director.

I really enjoyed the job, it was fantastic, but I found that I was blind but wanted to see the world.

I looked around and because what I wanted in terms of my travel aspirations didn’t exist I decided that I had two choices: either do without or build it myself, and so I set up Traveleyes.

I want Traveleyes to be a household travel company for not just blind people but sighted travellers as well. At the moment we run holidays for blind and sighted travellers but we want to be the household name where we are a travel company on a level-playing field for everyone.

AMAR LATIF: CAREER PATH

• 1997 – Degree in maths, stats and finance, University of Strathclyde
• 2000 – Trained and qualified as an accountant with BT
• 2004 – Established Traveleyes
• 2005 – Participant in Beyond Boundaries
• 2007 – Directed a Channel 4 documentary, Sightseeing Blind