2024 wrapped - why there's never been a more exciting time to become a Travel Counsellor

What an amazing year 2024 has been! From becoming a billion-pound business and smashing sales records, to winning prestigious awards and growing our community of travel entrepreneurs, it’s a year that’s shaped our future as we’re set to go beyond for customers and our community in 2025.

We look back at our highlights and shine the spotlight on some of the incredible things we’ve got in store for our business owners throughout the year ahead.

Empowering our business owners with world-class technology

We kickstarted the year by acquiring award-winning technology platform, Planisto – complementing our existing digital assets and helping our business owners to create and manage complex, personalised itineraries.

In February, we also launched TC Journeys – a bank of curated itineraries that Travel Counsellors can easily tweak to meet the needs of their customers. TC Journeys makes it quicker and easier than ever for our business owners to put together multi-destination quotes.

Smashing sales records during a productive peaks

January 2024 was the best-ever sales month in our 30-year history, hitting £125m - an increase of 12% year-on-year. With 110 of our independent business owners achieving total sales of £200k, it goes to show the power that a productive peaks has on the earning potential of our business owners.

Cementing our reputation with multiple award wins

Our trophy cabinet got bigger and bigger in 2024, with us adding the following accolades to our collection:

• Top Luxury Agency/Top Business Travel Agency at the TTG Top 50 Travel Agencies of 2024 Awards
• Best Homeworking Agency of the Year – Large Agency at the Travel Weekly Agent Achievement Awards
• Best Homeworking Network at the Wave Awards
• Star Homeworking Group at the Travel Bulletin Star Awards
• Agency of the Year – Homeworking at the ATAs Recognition Awards

Our induction and onboarding training became accredited by the Institute of Travel and Tourism

In August, we were thrilled to announce that our entire induction and onboarding training programme had been officially accredited by the Institute of Travel and Tourism (ITT). This achievement highlighted the exceptional standard of our training courses. In fact, we're among the first companies to have achieved this accreditation.

We became a billion-pound business

September saw one of the biggest achievements in our 30-year history – becoming a £1bn business! This landmark sales performance reflects the growing demand for personal leisure and business travel services and is a testament to the levels of care our independent business owners show to their customers and clients.

Celebrating success at our Annual Conference

What better way to celebrate a record-breaking year than at our flagship Annual Global Conference at the end of November. With 2,100 delegates, the event brought together our independent business owners, Support Hub colleagues, and valued supplier partners for a long weekend of motivational seminars, business updates, and opportunities to let our hair down and toast to an incredible 2024.

How we’re going beyond for our community in 2025

At our conference, we unveiled some exciting things we’ve got up our sleeve to support our Travel Counsellors and their customers in 2025 and beyond, including:

• A £16m investment in technology
• The launch of TC Co-Pilot – a new AI-powered assistant to help Travel Counsellors deliver highly personalised solutions to their customers
• The launch of The Interactive Quote – which harnesses the power of rich content to take customer itineraries to the next level
• A choice of Gold trips for our best-performing business owners to Canada, Florida and the Caribbean on-board a Celebrity Cruise, Turkey, Barbados, and Vietnam
• FAM trips secured to spectacular worldwide destinations, including the Galapagos Islands, Lapland, Sri Lanka, Florida, Athens, Japan, Namibia, Singapore, Cyprus, and Canada.

And that’s just the beginning. We can’t wait to see where 2025 takes, and we’d love for you to join us as we look to grow and strengthen our community of over 2,100 travel entrepreneurs even further. Whether you’re a seasoned travel professional or want to turn your passion for the world into a successful business, we’ve got a training programme to suit everyone.