Travel Counsellors

Travel Counsellors
One of TTG’s Top 50 Travel Agencies 2020

This trailblazing homeworking company, established more than 26 years ago, now has 1,300, largely home-based, agents in its UK network.

The team in head office works hard to ensure individual Travel Counsellors can benefit from the very best in training opportunities, with more than 100 educational trips coordinated for agents in 2019, alongside webinars and training events.

Travel Counsellors is also empowering its franchisees to target new markets, and last year launched day-long training sessions for consultants keen to upskill in handling meetings and incentive-travel, and large group bookings. Corporate travel has become an increasing focus too, with leisure agents encouraged to look within their existing database of clients to find SMEs that could benefit from having a professional to organise their business travel.

A new customer management system has been developed and implemented in the past 12 months to help consultants better understand their customers; the system shows when and how customers like to be contacted, as well as their accommodation preferences. Consultants have also been interacting with their clients in new ways, after training on creating vlogs from their travels to bolster their social media content.

An overhaul of the back-office system last year saw the introduction of sustainability scores to help agents guide their customers towards more responsible choices, while other green initiatives undertaken in the last year included getting rid of both plastic water bottles and business cards at the company’s 2019 annual overseas conference.

Though a very technologically advanced company, any innovation from Travel Counsellors’ head office team is designed to support individual consultants in offering a seamless, personalised service to each and every client. That might include sending birthday and anniversary wishes, emailing customers to alert them to a TV programme about the destination they’re travelling to, and using Whatsapp to communicate with more nervous clients at every step of their holiday.

This level of attention to detail clearly pays off; use of the independent review platform, Trustpilot, was introduced last year, with an extraordinary 97% average score garnered across more than 3,100 reviews.

travelcounsellors.com