The majority of Travel Counsellors focus on leisure bookings but how important is the corporate side?

Byrne: It’s super important. We think our business is better for doing both leisure and corporate. We have 2,100 Travel Counsellors (TCs) and around 200 are purely corporate and another 300 handle a mix of corporate and leisure travel. But these TCs account for 25% of our turnover, so you can see how important they are to the overall business. They also make up 70% of our top selling ‘Gold’ TCs.

How has the corporate side grown in recent years and what’s driving this?

Byrne: Our corporate sales have grown 40% since the pandemic and have now reached £240 million. Travel Counsellors as a whole has just passed the £1 billion milestone. We’re growing in two ways: by attracting more people to become TCs and also by helping existing TCs grow their business.

Our focus is on SME clients. That’s where we excel. But what we’re seeing now is that these businesses are growing, or they get bought out, and we’re looking after them as they grow, and we’re also winning new larger accounts – more than we ever before. Our tech platform now gives us the ability to service multi-million pound contracts through a combination of offline and online.

How are your Travel Counsellors handling these larger accounts?

Byrne: We’ve created the ability to service larger accounts through creating teams. So, you might have a TC who wins the account and then sets up a team to bring in other TCs to help with the fulfilment. We’ve created the technology that enables them to do that really easily.

TCs can identify other TCs who can help service the account, agree the commercial terms and get full visibility of all the bookings taking place in that in that team. It enables people to play to their strengths. So, you may not be a natural networker, but you may be good at looking after customers when you’ve got the bookings.

This has been pivotal in helping people grow their business and increase earnings. Our average earnings on corporate last year increased by 10%. We’re seeing particular growth in the sports, film, TV and creative sectors – anything that requires a tailored, attentive, high-touch, personalised service.

Quinn: Our business development managers are going out and winning new business. We’re going to sports events and other industry-specific events, and interacting with PA associations, to bring in this new business.

We’re also winning previously unmanaged accounts, which is still very much out there. Companies get to a certain point where their travel needs to grow and the office manager, or the PA, who has been managing travel for ages, can no longer manage it. Yes, the SME market is 100% our swim lane but we have to respect and acknowledge that at some point those SMEs scale and we need to be able to continue to support them.

What are your growth plans for the corporate side of the business?

Byrne: Our plan is to double sales figures by the year 2030, so to around £480 million – and £2 billion for the whole group. We want to continue to recruit and attract more people to become TCs and to encourage TCs to build their own businesses through creating teams, and also to help TCs improve their productivity through better technology, so they’ve got the ability to go and win and do more business.

The final part of the strategy is to invest in building a scalable platform so we can continually improve our technology platform, enabling us as a business to grow effectively and drive better efficiencies in the way that we work, and help the TCs be more efficient.

Quinn: We’ve spent the last two years building out our client-facing technical proposition and now we are turning the camera inside to make things better and more efficient for our TCs, using the likes of AI overlays and creating corporate workflows that work for them. Everything we build is built based on what they tell us they need.

Byrne: We’ve also grown the central corporate team significantly since Covid – probably three-fold – and we now have 18 people dedicated to corporate.

Quinn: Some of these new people have come from TMCs but we’ve also taken on people from outside travel. There’s a good balance between having the business travel knowledge but also bringing through new talent with transferable skills.

We want to expand the team further in the next few years. We currently have eight Business Development Managers and by the end of this financial year we plan to have 12 and then probably to 20 next year. These are the people bringing in the new business, putting the teams of TCs together to fulfil the new customers, and coaching and supporting TCs to grow their individual businesses.

What key trends are you seeing in the corporate space?

Byrne: We’re seeing our Travel Counsellors getting more involved in the goals and strategy of their clients, perhaps in terms of ESG and reducing carbon emissions, and being asked to provide management information and data to help their clients make better travel choices.

And we’re seeing a polarisation within corporate clients who might want a transactional booking tool for certain types of travel, but want a highly-personalised, bespoke, attentive, on-demand service for the corporate travel that’s either more complex, more instant or has more requirement to change.

How do you expect the current consolidation in the TMC sector to impact your business?

Byrne: Sadly, if there’s any disruption of talent from these affected businesses, we’re always interested in attracting the best talent, but we don’t want to compete and operate with those large accounts. We’re very clear about the sort of business that we want you want to attract and we want to excel at what we do and not try and be everything to everyone.

We don’t want to have any relationships where it’s just about the transaction. We are here to provide that personal, high-touch service. A great is example is with the Heathrow closure last Friday. Our TCs were up at 4am to rebook their customers before their customers even knew about the airport being closed. They weren’t waiting to go into a call centre on a roster, and they weren’t doing it because there was a roster. They were doing it because they’re running their own business and they feel an even deeper sense of accountability and requirement to look after their customers. It’s their business. They want that customer to come back to them.

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