Speaking at the company’s largest ever annual conference, held at the weekend in its home town of Manchester, Byrne said most of the growth will be from helping existing Travel Counsellors “and those that have yet to join us” to be “even more successful”.
Byrne led a management buyout of the business in 2014 and believes there’s plenty more to come in terms of growth. “We’ve got a broad target, and within five-seven years we will double the sales of the company to get us to a £2 billion business.
“The UK is blessed with an outbound travel market of around £60 billion – so there is potential to grow for sure. We know Travel Counsellors can attract more customers and by getting more of those customers to rebook with them, we will grow. Yes, there’ll be some growth in the numbers of people who join us – our nett new Travel Counsellors is around 100-150 a year in the markets we’re in – but growth comes primarily from within the network.”
There was much reflection on the past in this, Travel Counsellors 30th anniversary year, but plenty of looking to the future too. Travel Counsellors riffs heavily off being a technology company – but always one with heart – so not surprisingly, there was a big launch revealed at the event: TC Co-Pilot.
“This is unique in the B2B travel space: it is a completely bespoke recommendation engine that will enable Travel Counsellors to more quickly and readily create personalised, recommended itineraries for their customers at the touch of a button using a rich mix of both external and our own internal content,” Byrne explained.
“That’s the key. That’s the uniqueness. It is proprietary to us, all of our rich customer data, customer preferences, past travel dates, travel destinations, our reviews, plus external content all comes together so Travel Counsellors can search for the right holiday to meet the needs of the customer. It’s something seen outside of the industry a lot, but we think this is a first in travel.”
TC Co-Pilot is part of a £16 million technology investment made by the firm this year, including the earlier acquisition of Planisto, a platform that allows advisors to create and manage complex personalised itineraries for their clients and due for global roll-out in the coming weeks, chief technology officer Jon Bauer said. “TC Co-Pilot is a better way to unlock travel, a new way to browse and connect the world to [your] customers; we are trialing it now,” he added.
Bauer said there have also been around 3,500 platform improvements to Travel Counsellors’ in-house holiday creation software Phenix too, along with around 100 ideas implemented from among the community themselves.
Changing times
“The trend is towards a Travel Counsellor acting like a tailormade tour operator, handcrafting an itinerary using Phenix and utilising the relationships with DMCs,” Byrne said.
He added Travel Counsellors will still do “a material amount of business with integrated operators” outside of Phenix.
“There will always be a market for the integrated tour operators providing primarily short-haul beach product at a particular pricepoint, if they’ve got that pricing advantage in the market,” he said. “Then I think there will always be a really important role for specialist tour operators too, those who add value to the booking experience, and where Travel Counsellors feel confident their customer is going to be taken well care of.
“But what we’re saying, is that the emphasis is on reflecting how customers want more experiences and tailormade ones, and we want to enable TCs to be the tour operator without the risk in order to do that.”
Other new developments include the integration and roll-out into Phenix of Tui Musement, an online platform for activities, tours, museums, shows and art events. Launched in 2013 and subsequently acquired by Tui Group, it became Tui Musement in 2020.
Meanwhile Bauer said more “modernisation of the overall platform and simplification of processes” would also be key, along with a strategic focus on aviation and improved flight search capability.
The Travel Counsellors 30 Beyond conference attracted more than 2,000 people who heard from motivational speakers such as British beauty, fragrance and retail entrepreneur Jo Malone and Mo Gawdat, expert on artificial intelligence and happiness and bestselling author of Solve for Happy.
Firsts for this year included a lunch for 150 long-serving Travel Counsellors, those who have had more than 20 years of service. “I think the fact we have so many people here for so long says a lot about them and the company,” Byrne said.
