The Travel Franchise to double in size in next 12 months

“Our plan blows away all competition,” co-founder Steve Witt says

The Travel Franchise and its Not Just Travel brand has announced bold plans to double in size over the next 12 months.

This will be achieved through the creation of four new divisions, which will be unveiled over the coming months, according to co-founder Steve Witt (pictured).

Each one will act like separate businesses, “but together, will make Not Just Travel the dominant force in our industry.”

The new divisions will boost the company’s recruitment, sales, referral and customer offering, all of which will drive more profit for its members, the company says.

Heading up the departments is Cherie Richards, whose new role as the company’s chief of staff enables her to have a bigger influence on the entire company.

Cherie joined Not Just Travel in June last year as chief business development officer, following almost 12 years as director of commercial at Global Travel Group.

Not Just Travel is also adding a suite of new features to continue to improve customer experiences.

In addition, it’s investing significantly in new technology to support business and customer growth, including a business management platform and a bespoke customer database.

At the same time, the company will be recruiting more corporate team members, as well as expanding the company’s franchisee and homeworking base.

Steve says: “We’ve done incredibly well during the pandemic. We’ve continued to maintain, invest and grow the business.

“Our trade partners have been telling us how strong our holiday sales are compared to our competitors.

“In fact, we’ve been privy to information that shows our year-on-year or month-on-month sales have been as much as double our closest competitors.

“In March we achieved 50 per cent more holiday sales than January. That’s previously unheard of in travel sales, as normally the January booking season, known as ‘peaks’ in the industry, equates to 50-100 per cent more bookings than any other month.

“In fact, March 2021 was our busiest month in 14 months and nearly double our average month for the last two years.

“We sold more holidays in January-March 2021 than we did the last six months of 2020.

“Average customer bookings values have increased significantly to £4,356 per booking, up from £2,800 per booking back in 2019.

“It really does show how there is so much pent-up consumer demand for travel, as well as how consumer confidence is bouncing back.”

Over 800 members of The Travel Franchise have trained as Not Just Travel homeworking travel consultants, offering tailor-made holidays.

“The last 12 months have been tough on the entire industry, but we’ve used the time to plan and prepare for rapid growth over the next 12 months,” Steve says.

“This consistent success throughout the hardest times means we can be confident, bold and expand ahead of the travel gold rush. This is a new beginning for the travel industry and the next two years will be a boom time.

“As a result, we’ll see an even bigger and stronger family of staff, travel consultants and homeworkers, each focused on helping even more customers find their dream holidays.

“As part of this, we look forward to creating more opportunities for those people already in travel to be involved.

“Obviously, when you’re much smaller it’s easier to double or even quadruple in size. In fact, in our early days we were seeing triple-figure growth at times.

“But now, at our size even 10 per cent growth would be fantastic and most companies would be very excited by this. However, our plan to double in size blows away all competition.

“When we started just after 9/11, when no-one wanted to travel, we went on to build a hugely successful travel business.

“Today, there has never been more demand for travel, it’s just been difficult to go anywhere.

“The next few years are going to be the most exciting time for anyone in travel and we plan to make the most of it.”