I joined Independent Travel Experts part time in August 2017 as a homeworker, and then in 2019 I was involved in a serious car accident, which resulted in me losing most use of my right arm and consequently my full-time job. I had no choice to focus on my holiday business as my only source of income and do it full time.
Looking back, you could say a bad turn has turned out to be a fortunate turn. Thanks to the growth in my business since then, I was able to open a little village shop at the beginning of 2024 and have seen my sales and booking numbers increase considerably.
I am not your typical high street store due to very little footfall outside the shop, so most people who walk into the shop are there genuinely with a purpose of booking a holiday, and very little time wasters, and my business is built on referrals and word of mouth.
The reason I chose ITE was no set up fees, no sales targets and they were happy to take me on, with no travel background at all. So in my eyes it was a no-brainer! To add to that, and why it works for me with me now having a shop, the admin side of things are being looked after by our dedicated admin team back in Woking and this is a life saver, as my admin work is very limited and I tend to do this in the mornings before i move on to live enquiries in the afternoon. Another service I have utilised since having a shop more than a homeworker is the marketing team in HQ, from the simplest of tasks to the near impossible. Nothing is too much trouble for the team, and I rate the service from them and the whole team in HQ very very highly.
The best part of being part of ITE and to add the Travel Network Group is the sense of togetherness between all the groups when I attend the events arranged for us like conferences and business partner forums.
At the end of the day nothing is a given in life and we have to work hard at our jobs, to make us and our own businesses what they are today. There was a saying I read last year on one of the Facebook groups and is so so true “I do not want all the pie, only a little piece of the pie” and that is my little motto since reading that.
