Travel Counsellors celebrates record annual bookings

We’re incredibly proud to announce that in FY23, we achieved record booking figures of £933m. This is a year-on-year increase of 23%, representing a transformational compound annual growth rate of 16% since pre-pandemic levels.

Both our leisure and corporate-focused franchisees achieved record results, which is a testament to their dedication and hard work, as well as the quality of the wraparound support given by our support team colleagues.

UK leisure bookings increased 22% year-on-year, while corporate bookings were boosted by 24% - breaking the £200m barrier for the first time.

To help us achieve these superb results, we welcomed more than 340 new Travel Counsellors from a diverse range of backgrounds into our community, taking us to more than 2,000 business owners across the globe – all committed to providing world-class service to their customers.

This year, our franchisees created unforgettable travel experiences for more than 100,000 active customers, making over 300,000 bookings to a wide range of amazing destinations all around the world. The most-booked countries were the USA, Spain, and Greece. Meanwhile, cruise bookings rose by 66%, and trips to Australia by an enormous 167%.

We also saw very encouraging repeat customer rates, and we’ve successfully maintained our 5* rating on Trust Pilot.

Travel Counsellors CEO, Steve Byrne, said: “FY23 was an amazing year for Travel Counsellors. We achieved continued transformational growth by disrupting the travel market and welcomed a record number of new customers who trusted our community of outstanding Travel Counsellors with their leisure and corporate travel needs.

“Our very strong performance once again demonstrates the strength of our differentiated, disruptive, and scalable business model, as well as growing customer demand for our trusted and personal travel advice. I am incredibly proud of what we achieved.”

He added: “Our fantastic community of Travel Counsellors are the lifeblood of our business. We now work with a growing community of over 2,000 of the market’s most talented independent travel franchisees and I am delighted to say that the average sales growth by established Travel Counsellors increased by more than 20% year on year. This reflects the power of our technology platform, combined with our supportive community, which helps ambitious travel entrepreneurs to truly fulfil their potential.

“Looking forward, I am extremely confident that we are exceptionally well placed to achieve further significant growth over the coming years. Our current trading remains very strong, and we already have more than £350m of departures booked for FY24, which is up 30% on where we were at the comparable time in FY23.

“Our recent, inaugural Travel Tracker report highlighted the resilience of and growth prospects for the travel industry, with consumers looking to travel more often in 2024 and enjoy highly personalised experiences. Against this backdrop, we are focused on maintaining our momentum by continuing to disrupt the travel market and delighting even more customers with fantastic travel experiences, helping more travel entrepreneurs to grow their businesses in the years ahead.”

Would you like to help people tick off their travel bucket list, while running your own business and reaping the rewards yourself? We’re currently recruiting our next intake of Travel Counsellors, and it would be great to have you on board. Remember, you don’t need previous experience in the travel industry, as we’ll give you all the training and support you need to succeed. All you need to do is fill out this short form to let us know you’re interested, and a member of our team will be in touch to get to know you a little better.