Property entrepreneur and TV presenter Scott Huggins is used to travelling
long distances for a short period of time – he once went to Australia and
stayed there for just 38 hours.
“It was a mad schedule of filming and I had to shuttle between Heathrow,
Tenerife, Mozambique and Australia. I think I was in the air or at airports
for something like 52 hours in four days,” he said.
Huggins, 40, has presented various property programmes, including ‘Get A New
Life’ for the BBC. He set up his first property management company in 1989
and has used his expertise to set up Intrepid
Investments, which helps people invest in properties all over the world.
He has 2,500 registered clients and travels frequently to view properties
and help clients seal deals.
What was Mozambique like?
You have to travel via South Africa and at Johannesburg we changed on to a
small aircraft to travel to Beira. When we arrived, none of the luggage was
there. The film crew managed to muddle through with what they had carried on
as hand luggage, but yours truly had no spare clothes. I had to go and find
something decent to wear for filming, which is a challenge because
Mozambique is a very poor country. I got to one store and the manager had
ordered a suit from Italy which had just arrived. Amazingly it fitted me and
he let me have it, although understandably we had to pay through the nose!
Where have you been to recently?
Our last project was to buy 200 apartments in Germany; we raised two million
euros and a group of clients raised the rest, nine million euros, in
mortgages. Really it’s a good time to buy now, but some people take a bit of
convincing about that.
How much do you travel?
I’m trying to keep myself a bit more UK-based to run the company, but I
travelled an awful lot and between about 2002 and 2006. I think I was out of
the country more than I was in it. Working for relocation programmes in TV
usually means you get back to Heathrow, change a t-shirt and then get back
on a flight.
Tell us about your short-haul travel
Well, I’ll always go economy or no-frills because there is no point in paying
for business class on such a short journey. I’ll go with whoever is the
cheapest but I’m not a big fan of Ryanair.
We went to Norway and the airport was about two hours from the centre of the
country. I asked a taxi driver how much it would cost and he didn’t know
because he’d never done a journey that far before! We had to get on a bus
which took two hours and I won’t be doing that again. I’ve been unlucky with
Ryanair too, because I’ve been on flights that have been significantly
delayed.
What about long-haul travel?
