With nearly 20% of its bookings coming from customers recommending their homeworkers, The Personal Travel Agents promptly put together a two-stage plan to further boost referral sales.

The figure revealed not only how good the PTAs’ 150 active homeworkers were at selling travel, but importantly – how much their customers valued them.

“Due to the highly personal nature of a PTA’s business, referrals are key and creating a system whereby agents can monitor who their most supportive customers are – and then reward those customers for their loyalty – is invaluable,” head of The Personal Travel Agents Sheena Whittle told TTG.

The homeworking agency, which is part of Midcounties Co-operative, decided to overhaul its existing customer referral toolkit in two stages. The first stage began in September with the release of new assets, with the second phase towards the end of November.

In the coming days, software will become available to PTAs, which includes links customers can forward to family and friends to help drive referral bookings.

In their Business Insights Suite, PTAs now have a new referral tracker function – called “My Automated Referral Tracker” (MART). MART measures the number of bookings a customer makes with a PTA, and how many times a customer refers a PTA to family and friends.

“We’ve always had a referral scheme in place, but this year, we have relaunched it and added to it,” Whittle explained. “They can see who their biggest bookers are and who their biggest refers are. The way they perceive certain customers changes because of that information as a result.”

Quality over quantity

When asked about current PTA headcount and recruitment targets, Whittle is bullish. “We take a slightly different approach to homeworker numbers – for us it’s all about the quality of the recruits,” she explained.

“We’ve got strict criteria for agent recruitment, and we’ve always had the same stance. We don’t deal with inexperienced agents. It’s about focusing on individuals who are a good fit for the business.”

Since the homeworking division was launched in 2012, the PTAs senior leadership team has tended to focus on the “individual productivity”. It’s an approach that sets the group apart from other homeworking agencies, many of which target new agents with little or no experience and develop them.

According to Whittle, PTAs numbers have only increased by 2% this year. “We’re not on the same path as some of our competitors who try to bring through an inexperienced agent,” she added.

“We’re looking for travel industry experience, or ’Abta experience’. We’re really individual in how we approach that. We don’t have recruitment targets – we’re more about average earnings.”

Sales success

This approach to recruitment has seemingly paid off time and again. The Personal Travel Agents celebrated a second consecutive year of record sales at its recent conference onboard Uniworld’s Joie de Vivre in Paris, two months before the end of its financial year.

Speaking at the conference, which was attended by more than 80 PTAs, Whittle revealed a 25% year-on-year increase in sales, before revealing bookings had now jumped by 45% compared with pre-pandemic levels.

Crucially, the number of £10,000-plus bookings has gone up by more than a quarter (26%), Whittle told TTG, which all adds up to PTA homeworkers’ earnings increasing by 34% year-on-year.

Meanwhile, the PTA’s commission builder scheme, which pays extra commission levels based on volume, is due to award more than half of PTAs a share of over £270,000 at the end of the year.

“We emerged from the pandemic with another bumper year last year, and now we have bettered it again," said Whittle, proudly. "This will be our biggest sales year ever. It’s down to a number of things, but our agents stuck by our customers and we emerged from the pandemic with those relationships intact.”

But, even in areas where there aren’t particularly strong relationships between agent and customer, such as social media, PTAs are reporting growth. “Our social media business has grown,” Whittle added.

“We’ve made £5.5 million worth of bookings from social media this year, which is up 44% from last year. We’re seeing a lot of customers make bigger bookings via social media. Just a few years ago, the average booking price [from social media] was just under £1,000.”

River cruise focus

River cruise is another area Whittle wants to target in 2024. Currently, river cruise sales amount to less than 1% of all PTA bookings.

The Personal Travel Agents has launched a bespoke river cruise toolkit to boost sales in the lucrative sector that was described as “an area of significant untapped potential” at what was the homeworking agency’s 11th annual conference.

Whittle highlighted how river cruise customers are “very loyal”, while noting many fewer existing or potential clients have experienced a river sailing.

"We’ve identified river cruise as an area where we know we can grow because our PTAs have got the customers for it,” Whittle continued. “It’s an area where they can make a booking for more than £10,000. River cruise is a way for us to move forward.”