Travel Counsellors has announced remarkable sales growth for the past year and impressive forecast figures for 2012, as the travel company goes from strength to strength due the ‘highly personalised service it provides to its customers’.

The company has announced that despite the ongoing uncertainty the industry is facing, the company’s global sales for the financial year end (31 October 2011) were £346m, a 10% increase on last year. This includes a 7% increase in the UK, with a phenomenal 20% growth in sales in the company’s overseas operations, which have seen impressive growth over the past year. The previous year the company’s sales increased by 25%, and expects sales to increase to £390m for 2012. The company now has over 700 agents running their own travel businesses from home across the UK, with a further 400 plus operating overseas including over 90 in Australia.

Within the past 12 months over 700 of Travel Counsellors’ agents have grown their sales from the previous year, with the company now having nearly 130 top performing Gold agents with 6 of those in Australia. Managing Director Steve Byrne claims this success and growth is down to the trust that its agents build with their customers, and the added extras they provide such as complete financial protection through the company’s own Trust fund.

“In the face of some of the most severe circumstances within the industry our individual Travel Counsellors have grown their businesses,” Byrne comments. “This is testament to the way in which our agents embrace the support and technology available to them and focus on building invaluable relationships and trust with their customers. We believe that people buy people, not products. We are a people based business and that is what makes us different. We have a world beating customer satisfaction score* and two out of three customers that book with us choose to come back to us, which I believe is one of the highest retention rates in the industry.”

Travel Counsellors has reported that sales are strong for long haul city destinations such as Dubai and New York, with growth in both the corporate travel and cruising market. The company’s business travel agents have increased by 9% this year, with an impressive 11% growth in corporate travel sales. The company expects this growth to continue as it gains more major business accounts, with organisations now realising the value in the highly specialised and personal corporate travel service provided by the company’s Business Travel Counsellors.

Bookings are down for destinations such as Egypt following the political unrest, with a rise in popularity in Far East destinations including Thailand and Hong Kong, potentially as a result of this. Despite Greece’s uncertain economy the company are still seeing this as a firm holiday favourite for UK travellers. Over the past 12 months there has also been a late booking trend, for example during the summer the company saw holidays booked to travel the same or following month had risen by an average of 20%, with consumers remaining keen to take their main holiday of the year abroad, although often for 10 instead of 14 nights.

Byrne adds; “Because we take a lot of the back office work from our agents they have the time to get to know their customers’ needs. It’s all about offering the customer choice and finding the right holiday to suit their personal requirements and preferences. Our agents take the time to do this, and offer impartial advice as we are completely independent so there is no directional selling. The future of travel is all about the service, and those that go the extra mile will flourish even in the most uncertain economic times. Our business is going from strength to strength and we are extremely positive moving forward into 2012.”

*Travel Counsellors has achieved a world beating score of over 90% since it introduced the NPS system in 2007 to measure customer satisfaction, far outpacing Net Promoter Scores reported for other businesses, including travel agencies. The survey was taken from Fred Reichheld’s bestselling book ‘The Ultimate Question’. Travel Counsellors’ customers were asked the question ‘How likely is it that you would recommend your Travel Counsellor to your friends and colleagues?’ with the answer scaled from 0 to 10. This single question survey method, now part of Travel Counsellors’ culture, has also been embraced by other companies such Apple, Harley Davidson, Nike, Nokia, Shell, Dell and United Airlines.