Speaking at the company’s largest ever annual conference, held at the weekend in its home town of Manchester, Byrne said most of the growth will be from helping existing Travel Counsellors “and those that have yet to join us” to be “even more successful”.
Byrne led a management buyout of the business in 2014 and believes there’s plenty more to come in terms of growth. “We’ve got a broad target, and within five-seven years we will double the sales of the company to get us to a £2 billion business.
“The UK is blessed with an outbound travel market of around £60 billion – so there is potential to grow for sure. We know Travel Counsellors can attract more customers and by getting more of those customers to rebook with them, we will grow. Yes, there’ll be some growth in the numbers of people who join us – our nett new Travel Counsellors is around 100-150 a year in the markets we’re in – but growth comes primarily from within the network.”
There was much reflection on the past in this, Travel Counsellors 30th anniversary year, but plenty of looking to the future too. Travel Counsellors riffs heavily off being a technology company – but always one with heart – so not surprisingly, there was a big launch revealed at the event: TC Co-Pilot.
“This is unique in the B2B travel space: it is a completely bespoke recommendation engine that will enable Travel Counsellors to more quickly and readily create personalised, recommended itineraries for their customers at the touch of a button using a rich mix of both external and our own internal content,” Byrne explained.
“That’s the key. That’s the uniqueness. It is proprietary to us, all of our rich customer data, customer preferences, past travel dates, travel destinations, our reviews, plus external content all comes together so Travel Counsellors can search for the right holiday to meet the needs of the customer. It’s something seen outside of the industry a lot, but we think this is a first in travel.”
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