LionsTravel is run by Martina and Ján Bučko from Turzovka. They took their first group out in May 2009; today they have four guides and around 40 departures a season.

Our first departure left on 22 May 2009. Slovenia, Bled and Bohinj, a rented minibus and fourteen passengers, nine of whom we knew personally from Turzovka. Ján drove, Martina guided, and in the evening she added up the receipts on the kitchen table of the guesthouse, because neither of us could keep track of the tolar prices Slovenia had only just swapped for euros. We made 214 euros. Once fuel and our own hours came off it was not much, but all fourteen signed up for the Dolomites in September and two of them still travel with us. That was when we realised it was not a fluke, and that a travel agency can work even from a town of six thousand people that half of Slovakia cannot find on a map.

In 2011 we learned why it never pays to save money on the coach operator. On the way to Tuscany the clutch went in our rented coach near Villach in Austria, and twenty-two people spent seven hours at a petrol station car park. Ján found a replacement coach in Klagenfurt, paid for it out of his own reserve, and once we were home we refunded every client 50 euros, although the law did not require it at the time. It swallowed the entire profit for that season. Since then we work with two operators from the Kysuce region, we inspect their vehicles ourselves before each season, every tour budget carries a line for the backup plan, and we keep the numbers of tow services in four countries in our phones.

In 2013 we rented the office at Štúrova 37 and stopped receiving clients in our living room. A year later we added tours to Albania, a country most Slovak agencies were still avoiding. Ján drove across it alone in September 2014 with a paper map and a list of guesthouses from a friend in Tirana. The drive from Gjirokastra to Saranda took him five hours on a road that now takes two. Eleven people came on the first Albanian departure in 2015, and four of them only signed up because Martina talked them into it on the phone. Today we run two Albanian dates a year and both tend to sell out by the end of February.

Over sixteen seasons more than 6,500 people have travelled with us. That is modest next to the big agencies, but almost half of our clients come back, and that number means more to us than turnover. There are four of us in the office now, and on the road we are joined by guides Peter, Marek, Zuzana and Ivana, who have more than 300 departures between them. We have no plans to run groups larger than sixteen. We tried once, in 2017, with thirty people in Tuscany. Half the group spent twenty minutes longer than planned outside every museum, and it earned us the worst review we have ever seen. Sixteen has been our ceiling since, and it will stay there.