When 81-year-old solo traveller Geoff Kennedy jokingly invited Wendy to his Rugby home during a virtual lockdown tea party, he never expected her to accept. But Wendy remembered. Six years later, with Geoff now 87, she finally came to dinner.
At 87, Geoff Kennedy has travelled much of the world, gone back to university in retirement and is already planning his next adventure. But on a September evening this year, the person doing the travelling wasn’t Geoff. It was Wendy Wu, and she was on her way to his house in Rugby for dinner.
Six years earlier, Geoff had jokingly invited her.
Back then, it was September 2020. Geoff was 81, Britain was living through the pandemic, and the keen solo traveller was sitting at home taking part in one of Wendy Wu Tours’ virtual tea parties. Nobody could travel and nobody knew when they would be able to again, so Geoff and his fellow travellers talked instead – about the places they’d been, the adventures still to come and how wonderful it would be when everyone could finally sit around a table together again.
Somewhere in the conversation, Geoff made Wendy an offer: “Come to Rugby. I’ll cook you dinner.”
It became a running joke. Whenever their paths crossed over the following years, Geoff would remind her and Wendy would insist she hadn’t forgotten. Geoff never seriously imagined that the founder of a major international travel company, whose working life takes her around the world, would actually find an evening to turn up at his home.
Wendy had other ideas.
“I think Geoff thought I’d forgotten,” she says. “But I hadn’t. I’d always known that one day I was going to get to Rugby and have that dinner with him. I didn’t know when or how I’d fit it in, but I’d told him I’d come. And if I tell someone I’m coming, eventually I’m going to turn up.”
On 16 September 2026, almost exactly six years after that first invitation, Geoff was waiting outside his home. Wendy was coming for dinner.
When the world became very small
For two people whose lives had been shaped by travel, it was perhaps fitting that their friendship began when nobody could go anywhere.
When the pandemic brought international travel almost entirely to a halt in 2020, Wendy Wu Tours began holding virtual travel shows and tea parties. They were a way of keeping people’s travel dreams alive, but they also provided something less tangible and perhaps more important at a time of extraordinary isolation: company.
People accustomed to swapping stories around restaurant tables on the other side of the world were suddenly sitting at home. The virtual gatherings gave them somewhere to talk about the places they’d loved, remember adventures they’d already had and dream about those still to come.
Geoff had only discovered Wendy Wu Tours the previous year, following a recommendation from a friend. In 2019, he set off alone for Japan. It was his first trip with the company and the beginning of a remarkable late-life chapter of travelling the world.
It was during one of those lockdown gatherings that conversation turned to how good it would be when everyone could finally meet again and Geoff suggested that Wendy should come to Rugby for dinner.
“I probably said it without really thinking she’d take me up on it,” he says. “You don’t expect somebody who runs an international travel company to turn up at your house because you invited her during an online tea party.”
Yet for Wendy, those conversations had become intensely personal. She had spent decades building a business around sending people out into the world, travelling constantly herself and meeting customers across the globe. Suddenly there were no tours to operate, no aircraft to board and no certainty about when any of it might return.
“Covid took travel away from all of us almost overnight,” she says. “But it didn’t take away people’s curiosity or their need to connect with one another. Those tea parties reminded me that the thing I love most about travel has never really been the aircraft or hotels or even the destinations. It’s the people you meet because you went.”
One of those people was Geoff.
The 87-year-old who isn’t ready to stop exploring
At 87, Geoff has no intention of becoming an armchair traveller. Since his first solo trip to Japan in 2019, he’s explored Classical Greece, Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan, Sri Lanka, Portugal and Morocco. Next year, when he’ll be 88, he’s off to Kyrgyzstan.
And he’ll be going alone.
Not because Geoff particularly wants solitude. Quite the opposite. His partner is unable to travel with him, but Geoff has never regarded setting off alone as being lonely. Rather than choose holidays specifically designed for solo travellers, he prefers joining a regular group, enjoying the mixture of couples and independent travellers and the friendships that develop along the way.
“You arrive, meet everyone at the welcome dinner and very quickly you’re part of the group,” he says. “There are couples, there are other people travelling on their own and everybody mixes. The only time you’re really on your own is when you go back to your room to sleep.”
It’s a philosophy that goes some way to explaining Geoff himself. He isn’t simply interested in seeing places; he’s interested in people, conversation and continuing to discover things he doesn’t already know.
Retirement didn’t make Geoff less curious. It gave him more time to be curious. After finishing a career as a solicitor, he went back to university and earned a degree in Classics – and then did the obvious thing: travelled through Classical Greece to see some of it for himself.
Now he reluctantly accepts that the longest journeys may eventually have to give way to adventures closer to home. He is far less accepting of the suggestion that getting older should mean becoming less adventurous. Croatia, Slovenia, Romania, Corsica and Sardinia are already being discussed.
“There are far too many places left to see,” he says.
The invitation that wouldn’t go away
As the world reopened, Wendy’s life accelerated again. The international travel business she had spent decades building had to be rebuilt after the pandemic, across multiple markets on different sides of the world. Flights returned to her diary, along with launches, events, meetings and the relentless travelling that comes with having your name above the door of a global touring company.
Geoff went back to seeing the world too, yet somehow their paths kept crossing. He became a familiar face at travel shows, joining other customers to hear about new destinations and catch up with fellow travellers. Whenever Wendy was there in person, however, Geoff would invariably return to one outstanding piece of business: Rugby, dinner – you still haven’t been.
What had begun as an invitation during lockdown became a private running joke between them. Then, at a customer lunch at The Shard in London in February this year, Geoff reminded her again.
“I still didn’t really expect anything to come of it,” he admits.
This time Wendy gave him an answer: “Geoff, I’m coming.”
“I didn’t know when I was going to find the time,” Wendy recalls. “But every time I saw him, there he was – still travelling, still coming to our events and still reminding me about this dinner. I’d said I would go and I reached the point where I thought: I’m going to make this happen. Sometimes you just have to keep your word.”
Finding the evening wasn’t easy. Dates were discussed and rearranged as Wendy’s commitments changed, but eventually one stayed in the diary: 16 September 2026.
Dinner, six years late
Almost exactly six years after Geoff had first issued his invitation, Wendy boarded a train from London to Rugby. There was no business meeting waiting at the other end, no conference, launch or media appearance.
Just Geoff.
When Wendy arrived, he was waiting outside his home to greet her. “I was absolutely delighted,” he says. “You can invite somebody to dinner as many times as you like, but when that person is running a company and travelling all over the world, you don’t necessarily expect them to actually come. But Wendy did. That meant a great deal.”
Inside, the table had been beautifully laid and dinner prepared. This wasn’t a formal company dinner or a corporate event. It was exactly what Geoff had promised six years earlier: dinner at home.
They talked about Geoff’s years as a solicitor, his decision to return to university, his travels and all the destinations still waiting to be explored; about Wendy’s life and her own years of travelling; and about that extraordinary period in which their paths had first crossed, when neither of them knew quite when the world would open again.
Then came the lemon sorbet.
Wendy loved it. On discovering that it had come from Sainsbury’s, the woman who has built a career sending people to some of the most extraordinary places on earth immediately wanted to know exactly which tub Geoff had bought so she could track it down herself.
“One minute we’re talking about travelling around the world,” laughs Geoff, “and the next we’re discussing where Wendy can buy lemon sorbet.”
It was gloriously ordinary – and perhaps that’s why the evening mattered. For several hours there was no travel entrepreneur and no customer, just two people who had first met through a computer screen six years earlier, sitting around the same table at last.
Eventually Wendy had to leave to catch her train back to London; she was flying out again the following morning. Six years after Geoff had invited her to dinner at a time when neither of them could travel anywhere, she had travelled to Rugby simply because she’d told him she would.
“I told you I’d get there”
Ask Wendy why making that journey mattered enough to find the time and her answer returns to something those lockdown tea parties taught her: travel, ultimately, is about people.
“The people who travel with us have always meant so much to me,” she says. “They trust us with some of the most precious weeks of their year and with experiences they’ll remember for the rest of their lives. I love getting to know them, hearing their stories and seeing them come back to travel with us again and again.”
“Geoff stayed with us through Covid. He kept coming to our shows, kept travelling with us and, most importantly, kept asking me to dinner. So of course I went.
“It might have taken me six years, Geoff – but I told you I’d get there.”
For Geoff, the story isn’t quite finished. At 87, he’s already looking towards Kyrgyzstan next year and wondering which parts of Europe should come afterwards. There are, as he says, simply too many places left to see.
And if Wendy happens to find herself back in Rugby?
Well, Geoff knows what to serve for dessert.
