THE UK home-working agency group, Travel Counsellors, has launched in Australia and will move on to South Africa before turning its attention to Asia.
Travel Counsellors has about 780 homeworking staff worldwide and sees itself as a technology-led global travel company employing some of the industry’s most savvy agents.
The Australian operation is based in Melbourne and represents the sixth launch of the home-working concept overseas in the last two-and-a-half years.
Travel Counsellors are trained in the company’s extensive intranet booking system, customer management solution and dynamic packing system, Phenix.
The Phenix system was developed inhouse and allows agents to quickly search and compare different travel options in minutes, saving time and allowing more control over pricing.
Travel Counsellors said agents are better informed than any customer going to the Internet and, with access to net rates, they can control the price, enabling a better deal for the customer.
Steve Byrne, managing director of Travel Counsellors, said technology was vital not only in allowing counsellors to work from home, “but it also benefits every part of the business, including our in-house training programme.”
Byrne said that the company is keen to look at all new opportunities and is seriously considering India and China for new operations. “In some markets the idea of travel agents working from home is a new concept,” he said.
“What is the same in every country is that we will only recruit the best, most experienced agents and the emphasis will be on building a close, personal relationship with the customer while being part of an international community of counsellors, who support each other.
“There have been travel agents working from home for years, but our model is unique and quite different.” Peter Watson, formerly with Jetset, ATAC, Jetset TravelWorld and Concorde, has joined as general manager Australia.
He said based on the UK experience, the people who would be attracted to Travel Counsellors were ownermanagers of High Street agencies who were tired of rising costs, increased administration and lower yields. Watson said a second group were experienced travel consultants who felt unrewarded by the work they did.
“They want to branch out on their own but find that that too costly and too hard.” Watson said that a major benefit of working for Travel Counsellors was the technology solutions it offered. “I’ve never seen any better technology for travel agents. It makes it so easy to sell travel.”
Lisa Hillyard is not untypical of the profile of a Travel Counsellor. She became disenchanted working for a High Street travel agency and believed that with the right support, she had the enthusiasm and the energy to make a success of selling travel – in her own time and in her own home.
That was eight years ago and she said she has never looked back since. Hillyard, from Northampton in England, said Travel Counsellors attracted people with solid experience and a commitment to “good, old fashioned service”.
She said her job is made easier by the support of sophisticated technology and an intranet message board system that allows consultants to exchange knowledge about product and destinations worldwide.
“If you work in an agency with five or six other people, one person may have the information you require whereas with Travel Counsellors I can call up the knowledge base of hundreds of agents,” she said.
“You never feel that you are home alone doing your work because you can pick up the phone and talk to another counsellor or chat over the web cam.” Each consultant has his or her own website linked to the Travel Counsellors main page.
