How Travel Counsellors “will be a £2 billion business within seven years”

TC Co-Pilot is part of a £16 million technology investment made by the firm this year, including the earlier acquisition of Planisto, a platform that allows advisors to create and manage complex personalised itineraries for their clients and due for global roll-out in the coming weeks, chief technology officer Jon Bauer said. “TC Co-Pilot is a better way to unlock travel, a new way to browse and connect the world to [your] customers; we are trialing it now,” he added. 

Bauer said there have also been around 3,500 platform improvements to Travel Counsellors’ in-house holiday creation software Phenix too, along with around 100 ideas implemented from among the community themselves. 

Changing times 

“The trend is towards a Travel Counsellor acting like a tailormade tour operator, handcrafting an itinerary using Phenix and utilising the relationships with DMCs,” Byrne said. 

He added Travel Counsellors will still do “a material amount of business with integrated operators” outside of Phenix.  

“There will always be a market for the integrated tour operators providing primarily short-haul beach product at a particular pricepoint, if they’ve got that pricing advantage in the market,” he said. “Then I think there will always be a really important role for specialist tour operators too, those who add value to the booking experience, and where Travel Counsellors feel confident their customer is going to be taken well care of.

“But what we’re saying, is that the emphasis is on reflecting how customers want more experiences and tailormade ones, and we want to enable TCs to be the tour operator without the risk in order to do that.” 

Other new developments include the integration and roll-out into Phenix of TUI Musement, an online platform for activities, tours, museums, shows and art events. Launched in 2013 and subsequently acquired by TUI Group, it became TUI Musement in 2020. 

Meanwhile Bauer said more “modernisation of the overall platform and simplification of processes” would also be key, along with a strategic focus on aviation and improved flight search capability. 

The Travel Counsellors 30 Beyond conference attracted more than 2,000 people who heard from motivational speakers such as British beauty, fragrance and retail entrepreneur Jo Malone and Mo Gawdat, expert on artificial intelligence and happiness and bestselling author of Solve for Happy. 

Firsts for this year included a lunch for 150 long-serving Travel Counsellors, those who have had more than 20 years of service. “I think the fact we have so many people here for so long says a lot about them and the company,” Byrne said.