As the travel industry bounces back, with over 320 Travel Counsellors reporting their best ever selling month in January 2022, the leading independent travel company has announced a major recruitment drive.
This comes as a recent survey from people in the company’s talent pool revealed that almost two thirds are interested in setting up their own travel business within the next year, with over 70 percent of those looking for new career opportunities from outside of the travel industry.
The main reasons cited for wanting to become a Travel Counsellor include a better work life balance, embracing new challenges, a love of travel and interaction with people, the independence and flexibility of self-employment, and a desire to return to the travel industry following displacement.
Travel Counsellors is renowned for encouraging entrepreneurship within the travel industry and the company is seeing an increase in enquiries from those looking to set up their own travel businesses, with interest levels now recovering to pre-pandemic volumes. To support this growing interest the company has launched its campaign ‘TCs Like You’, which showcases the diverse ways Travel Counsellors run their individual business using the company’s high touch, digitally enabled platform.
Matt Harding, head of recruitment at Travel Counsellors said: “There is such a demand for travel professionals as customers are looking for trusted advice and a highly personalised service more than ever before. As a result many of our existing Travel Counsellors have had their most successful ever start to the year and we want to show potential joiners that with the right tools and support anything is possible.
“The campaign aims to demonstrate the diversity in our TC community and the ways in which Travel Counsellors run their businesses. From cruise to corporate specialists and those who work in a team or have built their business through referral and social media, we have some amazing examples of franchisees who have built successful business in a way that suits them and their customers using our support platform.”
Despite the Covid-19 pandemic, Travel Counsellors’ pioneering franchise model continued to gain interest and helped 240 individuals start their own business in the UK since March 2020. Widely known for empowering its franchisees with the tools, technology and support to run their own travel business from anywhere in the world, the organisation quickly pivoted its model during the pandemic from face-to-face training, to virtual blended, instructor-led live-streamed sessions online.
As such, the Travel Counsellors team saw the benefits of embracing technology and fully redesigned the induction and training programme. All content is available on demand, meaning that new Travel Counsellors can work from anywhere in the world and train at any time of day, enabling them greater flexibility to manage their development in a way that suits them.
Travel Counsellor, Emma Diamond, set up her business in September 2020 after being made redundant from a previous role in travel. She has since become a Gold Travel Counsellor, which means she is one of the top sellers, no mean achievement from setting up her business in the middle of the pandemic.
Emma said: “June 2021 was pretty much the start of the busiest few months for me, and it’s just got better and better since then. I’ve since hit Gold, surrounded myself with an incredible bunch of like-minded TCs who I speak to all day every day, I’ve hired a TC assistant and expanded my business exponentially, including onboarding a few corporate accounts (which is brand new to me)!”
