InteleTravel’s entrance into the UK homeworking market five years ago caused a stir – a furore even. The legitimacy of its operations, in particular its recruitment, was repeatedly questioned. It was branded – written off even – as a multi-level marketing business, a pyramid scheme, something its senior leaders have always refuted.

But with Abta membership and an Atol certification has come acceptance; whether those protestations were fair, or any more than an act of collective self-defence and solidarity on the industry’s part, it is all a thing of the past for boss James Ferrara. At InteleTravel, they do – and always did – things differently.

“To try to protect against new ideas or new competitors never works – it’s like railing against the storm," Ferrara tells TTG at the company’s annual conference. "Our place right now is as a leader in the travel agent homeworker space. We are certainly the biggest homeworking agency by number of agents – no one even comes close. But we are not the biggest homeworker agency yet by travel sales – and we will be."

His confidence is reflected in the buoyant atmosphere at the conference, held at Belfast’s historic Assembly Buildings, which comes off the back of the company recording record UK sales. “2021 turned out to be our best year ever globally," says Ferrara.

"Prior to that, it had been 2019. When a lot of businesses were beginning their pandemic recovery, we came back fully recovered. And then 2022 became our new best year ever. With the growth rate in the UK, we doubled our business in terms of travel sales.”

Although the UK has been the most successful of the company’s markets in the past few years, that success has been “hard won” according to Ferrara, who reflects candidly on the challenges InteleTravel went though to get the company going here. “It took two years to get to our Abta membership and another two years to get to our Atol,” says Ferrara, “So we are fully committed to the UK market.”

Bullishly addressing the questions around the legitimacy of InteleTravel’s business model during the early days of its entry into the UK market, Ferrara stresses these quickly dissipated once the business received the traditional validations. "You have to look to yourself and change," he continues. "I think people learned that lesson. We got Abta and most of them quietened down.

"A few said, ‘you’ll never get Atol’, and we got Atol. We haven’t heard a peep out of anyone since. We’re here, and we’re here to stay."

Setting the record straight, Ferrara highlights how InteleTravel has always used PlanNet Marketing for its recruitment, and offered no incentives to its franchisees to recruit new agents – a charge previously levelled at the business.

“There’s never been any compensation for recommending agents at Intele, only PlanNet Marketing," he explains. "We pay PlanNet Marketing a recruiting fee every time they get someone. That was a big thing that had to get worked out – people didn’t understand our business model, but we had to show Abta exactly what we were doing, and they got over it very quickly.”

Perhaps encouraging agents to sell primarily to family and friends was misconstrued, but ultimately, Ferrara credits the business model with the company’s rapid pandemic recovery and subsequent success. “The most important thing is the business model – it’s the fact that our agents are selling to people they know, people they have relationships with, from some other life they have," he says.

"They’re not sitting in a high street office doing just this, they’ve got this rich life of trust bonds with other people. That’s the kind of selling that they do – it’s your brother-in-law who is your travel agent. Those are the last bonds to break – those are the ones that hold on the best. I believe that’s how our agents were able to perform the way they did during the pandemic when other types of marketing weren’t working.”

In fact, Ferrara reveals InteleTravel’s agent headcount actually grew during the pandemic. “Our model has actually come into play even more during the pandemic," he continues. "People were reprioritising and got used to the idea you could be productive from home. We got a lot of interest during that time – 2020 and 2021 were big new-agent years for us. We had a lot of new agents as a result of this shift in mindset.

“We’re already at twice the number of agents that I ever projected for the UK market. There are 11,500 agents in the UK, almost 80,000 worldwide.”