Home based travel advisor

sandiejannorman

Hi Everyone

Has anyone tried working from home as a travel advisor/agent?

The co-operative and other travel agencies offer jobs for people to be travel advisors working from their home. They supply a pc and phone line etc.

I just wondered if it was worth giving it a go and if there was any decent money to be made?

I don't want start up and find out that you don't make a lot of money from it.

I really need something to top up my wages from my 'real' job and dont want to do party plan anymore.

Can anyone offer me any advice or stories from their own experience.

Thanks

Lilystar

Hi Sandie,
I used to work at Head Office for the co-op home based section, so I know a bit about it. Do you have any experience in travel? If you do, and you can build up a decent client base who will use you a lot, then you can make decent money. You need to be able to offer some expertise in finding specific holidays, or putting together unusual packages to really hit the high commissions though.

If you don't, then it's still possible to earn some money doing this, but you need to do fairly decent volume, as you will be getting smaller commissions on each sale, and you will have costs you need to cover each month.

In my experience, the agents who made a lot of money were either the ones who picked up local business travel clients, or those who offered a really personal service, so would deal directly with the clients for everything, rather than letting the after-sales admin teams deal with any queries etc.

I also know that with the Co-op at least, there were several training courses you had to complete before you could start taking calls, although I can't guarantee that that is still the case.

Hope that helps.

sandiejannorman

Thanks Lilystar for getting back to me.

Sounds like you have to put an awful lot of work into this. Be the kind of thing for someone that doesnt already have a job.

Unfortunately I dont have the experience but I remember my MIL did this some years ago and she'd never working in the travel industry.

I would love to work in the travel industry but would rather have a set hourly rate than commission based.

You have really been helpful

Lilystar

Hi Sandie,

Yes, at the moment, it does need a lot of work to make money, as margins and commissions in the whole travel sector are slim. If your mil was doing this early on, it was a lot easier to make money just booking basic packages off teletext without any particular knowledge. The problem is, an agent doing that is not really adding anything the customer can't get by going direct to the tour op, so there's little money in it.

High Street travel agents pay hourly usually with some commission/incentive top ups, but you would probably be competing against experienced/qualified people for those jobs. If you have any independent agents in your local area, it might be worth seeing if they are looking for any staff, chains will usually want experience/training and the indies tend to be better at training in knowledge rather than just sales technique.

Good luck!