Seven years after launching her business with Travel Counsellors, home-based agent Claire Bottone’s efforts were starting to bear fruit.

The year was 2014, and Claire was enjoying great success – professionally and personally. The mum-of-three was three months into her London Marathon training programme.

However, just as things were starting to take off, Claire’s world came crashing down.

Her dad was diagnosed with terminal cancer, and a few weeks later, doctors discovered her mum’s cancer had spread quickly too. To make things even worse, her mum needed major surgery to remove her eye.

However, thanks to the help of another Travel Counsellor, Claire was able to juggle hospital visits, training runs and, in her words, “a very busy business”.

Claire Bottone

“I had great support from my Travel Counsellor friend, who is also called Claire,” she says. “This allowed me time to care for my parents. My dad died in 2015, and soon after, my mum’s cancer became terminal. She passed in 2016.

“After immense tension and emotion, I hit a real low and found myself very alone with my own thoughts. I became withdrawn and my business suffered.”

Fortunately, Gemma Fletcher from Travel Counsellors' Business Coaching Team spotted something was wrong. Claire was encouraged to speak to a professional, something every Travel Counsellor has access to.

“I spent a lot of time working on myself and this included relying on others in the Travel Counsellors community to help me rebuild,” adds Claire.

Every homeworking agency TTG spoke to, both large and small, confirmed they had processes in place to catch struggling agents when approached for this article.

This is one of several initiatives agencies offer in response not only to the trend towards homeworking in recent years, but also as the impact personal issues, burnout and loneliness can have on mental health is better understood and appreciated.

'We're limited'

Experience It Now Travel has three shops in Eastbourne, Peacehaven and Halesham, as well as more than 200 homeworkers – and counting.

Co-owner Richard Light is acutely aware of how the business is restricted, to a degree, in terms of the wellbeing support it can offer homeworking agents based miles away from the agency's head office on the south coast.

“We’re limited because we’re a Sussex-based organisation and our homeworkers are all over the country,” he says.

Nonetheless, he quickly lists all the touch points a home-based Experience It Now agent has.

There’s a weekly virtual coffee morning, an annual UK conference, round-the-clock support for homeworkers, weekly supplier training and business development calls that can be booked at any time.

“If we see that people are not active, we will call them,” Richard explains. “We send a link out to everyone so calls can be booked whenever they want. It’s obviously very isolating if you are at home all day, every day. You want to feel part of the community.”

Yvonne Holmes, Director of Classic Travel in Essex, was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2020. Her diagnosis encouraged her to rethink how she operated her business, at which point she decided to “consolidate” her agency and work from home.

“Thankfully, I’m so busy all the time I’m not lonely," she says. "It helps that I have long conversations with my clients, some of whom I’ve been booking for 30, 40 years. I know them really well. We can have nice conversations.

“Maybe agents who are not married or live alone might be lonely? I think it depends on what their personal situation is.”

Yvonne happily points out her husband Peter does all the administrative tasks that she doesn’t like doing, which frees her up to do what she does best – sell holidays.

Under pressure

Loneliness, though, can hit you when you least expect it. Daisy Udy will have worked at Iglu for three years in October. She has just returned from 10 days’ annual leave that came after a work trip to Bangkok when she speaks to TTG.

She felt under pressure to generate sales leads quickly. “I needed to build my sales leads back up… people were supportive and just told me to keep on going,” she says.

Iglu

Fellow Cruise Travel Expert Vicky Connelly, who is sitting next to her friend Daisy on the call, explains how the group each Iglu agent is assigned to when they start quickly becomes a “working family” of sorts.

Alex Head, Head of Talent and Development at Iglu, adds: “Beating loneliness is an important topic for us. Technology has given us the ability to leverage being remote. It’s really important to us to deliver that people first culture.”

'You can feel a bit isolated'

The Holiday Village – part of the Blackpool-based Travel Village Group – does not have the same resources that perhaps Iglu or Travel Counsellors have. However, Paula Nuttall, who runs the division, understands the pitfalls of working from home.

“Sometimes, they can feel a bit isolated if there’s an enquiry they’re not familiar with and they don’t have that colleague sitting next to them to explain it," she says.

“We have weekly call with all 78 Holiday Village homeworkers. We have a supplier on the call at the start and then it’s a bit of a blank canvas. We’ve been doing that for eight months since around the start of the Middle East crisis. It’s a good opportunity for people to talk.”

She also highlights the group-wide "Talk Not Tap" initiative which, as the name suggests, encourages staff to pick up the phone and chat to colleagues rather than fire off yet another email. This, she believes, helps staff build connections with one another even if they are miles apart geographically.

This year, a wellbeing coach who draws heavily from the chaotic experience of launching her own wedding business has delivered several sessions to agency staff. “She recognises the signs of what burnout looks like," Paula explains. "She has some top tips about being stepping away from your desk."

'We want everyone to feel cared for'

Knowing when to leave your desk is a valuable tool for all homeworkers. Claire, of course, knows all too well how lonely it can be. “Working from home while trying to establish a business can be a very lonely place,” she said. “You can be given all the technology and all the tools but it’s very easy to retreat.

“The very nature of sales is that the highs are high and the lows are low. The pit of loneliness can be quite deep.”

But she argues initiatives like Travel Counsellors’ Feel Good Friday Coffee mornings are an effective way of identifying who in the team is struggling.

The virtual coffee mornings started in 2021 – the brainchild of the agency's Engagement Director Karen Morris. Claire estimates 100 Travel Counsellors with “nowhere else to turn” have been on these weekly calls since they began.

Karen explains: “We want to make sure that everyone feels cared for. The more engagement a Travel Counsellor has, the more successful they will be. That is why we’ve created all these support avenues.”