Travel Homeworking

[moggy]

Hi

Does anybody here work from home for a travel company??

 

[zellip]

Hi,

I work from home as a small specialist tour operator. I have two other people who come to work with me, one who works from my 'home office' 3 days per week and works the other 2 days from her own home via a laptop and connection to our office server.

 

[moggy]

Hi

Thanks for your reply.

I am looking to start with the likes of Hays Travel from home. Ipreviously worked for Lunnpoly as a Manager and am looking to get into the homeworking side of things.

Do you find it pays enough?

 

[zellip]

We are a small tour operating company who sell through retail agents and to our own direct clients. Interestingly enough our fastest growing retail sector is homeworkers i.e. Travel Counsellors, Hays Travel, Fortune Travel. We really like the way they work, the quality of service they provide and the overall enthusiastic attitude they have for what they do and they seem to like that we work the same way i.e. personal service, flexible hours, fast response, tailored solutions.

Most of the enquiries we have received have been for tailor made solutions and have been for high revenue bookings so the income from these has been excellent for the agent. There are also a number of homeworker agents we have developed close working relationships with and they seem to be doing VERY well!

 

[Rienne]

Hi Moggie

I spent a lot of years in the travel industry, owning both a tour operator and a travel agency and one or two of my old team went on to be homeworkers. One in particular is doing very well, but then again he alway used to sell well for us anyway. Believe it is a slow burn to kick off with - maybe up to a year or so to get a decent income stream coming in, especially if you are being paid on departure date rather than booking date (Travel Counsellors pay this way, I am not sure about Hays).

I was approached for advice only a few weeks ago by someone who was thinking of taking up a Travel Counselllors franchise, and the commission split was I believe 60/40. So first year say £250k sales, which would be the minimum acceptable in a shop @ average 10% x 60% is around £15k. Those kinds of levels were what TC also were projecting in their franchise pack, from memory. Nothing to write home about.

I think the way to do it is to become known as a specialist, and obviously at the higher ticket / commission value. The obvious ones for me are honeymoons / cruise / Australia but obviously there are loads more as you know. At the end of the day it is not trying to be all things to everyone, or you could waste a lot of time, and there are now more and more homeworkers out there.

Hope it all works out, feel free to get in touch at any time.

best wishes
Jeff

 

[moggy]

Thats great to hear.

I have an interview with Future Travel and have been accepted by Hays already but was a bit anxious as when I worked for Lunnpoly business seemed to be very slow at the latter end which forced many of our shops to close.

 

[moggy]

Rienne

Are you still in the Travel Industry now?

 

[Rienne]

Hi Moggie

Not directly, but I have a new villa advertising website which is shortly to be coming out of free trial - www.villawarehouse.com , and I work with travel businesses on a consultancy basis to help them with mostly product, contracting, branding issues.

There are a couple of things with Lunn Poly in that TUI are not going to plough much money into marketing the shops these days, and will take the opportunity to shut them as the leases expire. But more importantly, it has a very narrow range, and trades largely on price. Kind of the anithesis of what an agency should be really (in my opinion).

 

[moggy]

Yeah, agreed.

I have since worked for a couple of independant agencies but really would like to "go it alone" i think.

I would like to target the Australia market but there does not seem to be an option to do this with any homeworking company