Blue Bay Travel homeworker Lisa Phillips returned to travel earlier this year after 13 years working in recruitment seeking a better work-life balance – and with her dad Mick in poor health.

The 53-year-old admits she had a bit of a "mid-life crisis" before joining The Personal Travel Consultants in Partnership with Blue Bay Travel (PTCs) in August.

After deciding to return to the profession that brought her the most happiness – selling travel to people – she was mindful of finding a role that offered her the flexibility she needed to have daily catch-ups with her dad over breakfast.

Within days of launching her Blue Bay-backed business, Dreamscape Journeys, Staffordshire-based Phillips asked her daughter Poppy how TikTok worked after having conversations with a friend about other social media platforms.

Poppy, who was 12 years old at the time, was initially sceptical and tried to explain TikTok wasn’t right for what her mum wanted to do, but was supportive of her nonetheless. “My first video was not of me talking, it was just a deal, but it got 7,500 views," Phillips reveals.

Credit: Lisa Phillips/ Blue Bay Travel

Five months on, Phillips is promoting deals from the likes of Tui, Jet2holidays and Travelpack on TikTok every day, as well as luxury breaks to the Maldives or Zanzibar.

In the morning, often using her horse Bullseye as “a crutch”, Phillips posts a video telling followers how she will be promoting a deal later in the day before returning to the platform just before lunchtime to share the holiday offer.  

'TikTok is a sales tool for me'

Phillips posts a wide range of offers and doesn't rely on deals supplied by Blue Bay Travel. She stresses she doesn’t have any concerns about using Chinese-owned TikTok.

“I just see it as another sales stream,” Phillips explains. “A lot of travel agents use Facebook to build a presence online, but it seemed like it would take me too long to get any traction on there.

“I post on TikTok every day – it’s my favourite platform. I won’t post needlessly on there, I know consistency is key. I use it as a sales tool. It fits in really well with my day. I wouldn't say I’m 100% confident on social media. I don’t always know what works and what doesn’t, but I give it a go.”

She reveals in the first few weeks of using TikTok, she would often feel more comfortable talking to camera with Bullseye walking beside her. “I would be out walking in the rain with him and would say into the camera – ‘who wants to go on holiday?’,” she continues. “At the beginning, I found it easier to talk into the camera with him. I would use him as a crutch.”

To illustrate how her confidence has grown in the past five months, Phillips recently launched “Cuppa and Catch Up” on her TikTok account. That event goes out live Monday to Friday at 12.30pm.

Starting on Wednesday (31 December), Phillips will welcome guests from Red Sea Holidays, Celebrity Cruises, MSC Cruises and Jet2holidays to Cuppa and Catch Up to talk about their products as peaks gets under way.

Lucrative cricket tour bookings

In 2000, while Phillips worked for Travel World in Hanely, Stoke-on-Trent, she landed her first cricket tour booking for 120 people to Barbados.

The player who organised the tour 25 years ago recently approached Phillips to ask if she would consider booking another tour to mark the 25th anniversary of that original trip.

“I’ve now come back to cricket tours,” she reveals. “I did a TikTok calling out to all cricketers saying I can organise a tour for you. It attracted 92,000 views in 24 hours.”

While Phillips is wary of sharing the details when the tour has not yet been confirmed, she is currently organising a £57,000 trip to Barbados for teams who study at a Yorkshire university. “They will go away for 10 days – 28 people, two teams and some coaches,” she says.

Each time she organises a Caribbean cricket tour, she works with Team Travel Caribbean – a company which does its best to pair the English team with another side in the Caribbean of a similar standard.

“I tell them the strength of the team and they will match them with the right side,” she explains. “They will also sort any excursions for me.”

When asked what the biggest booking she has ever made was, Phillips says: “My biggest-ever booking was that cricket tour 25 years ago. I hope they do confirm the anniversary tour in 2028. They have 70 players wanting to go. That will be a £105,000 booking.”

Thanks to TikTok, and the connections she has made on the ground in the Caribbean, Phillips is generating a lot of business from booking cricket tours. “I’ve another couple of enquiries from people asking, ‘are you the lady who does cricket tours?’,” she adds.

Phillips estimates leads from TikTok are driving around 30% of her overall business. “It really is the place where you go to sell something,” she says. “The market is younger, and it’s younger people looking for late deals. My Facebook page has grown by 200 followers since I mentioned it on TikTok the other day.”

Phillips reveals how her TikTok following compares with her daughter Poppy’s own account. “I think she's quite surprised with how I’ve embraced TikTok, but she’s very supportive – I think I’ve got 200 more followers than her!"

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