The boss of InteleTravel says the “low bar of entry” it offers recruits has been a “blessing” during Covid by allowing thousands of people to gain a new income stream.
President James Ferrara insisted that those signing up with InteleTravel should not be judged against traditional travel agents in terms of their sales numbers.
Speaking on a Travel Weekly webcast, he said: “Our offering in the UK has been far more attractive than we expected. We passed my numbers quite a while ago.”
InteleTravel announced last week that the company has more than 10,500 recruits in the UK and is on course to turn over £25 million in collective sales between them at the end of the year, despite Covid.
Ferrara added: “The number of advisors has grown phenomenally. We are throughout the country [the UK] and we have been successful because of the nature of our offering. It’s such a reasonable offering, it is such a low bar of entry into the travel industry.”
The rise in InteleTravel’s recruits was a “blessing in the adversity this year”, he added. “People have opened their minds. They have reassessed their lives, reassessed their priorities, their quality of life, their lifestyle, and they have found in us something powerful. And, for some of them, it’s about not being in a position where a single employer can furlough you, stop your income or stop your career. It’s about putting yourself in charge, at least in part, as a second income stream as a backup, as a future.”
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He reiterated InteleTravel’s mantra that a ‘Plan B can become Plan A’, and said that the bolstering of recruits was also driven by “tens of thousands” of people in the industry being “displaced” amid widespread redundancies in travel.
When it was put to Ferrara that the majority of recruits must be making relatively few sales because when overall turnover is divided by the number of recruits it works out as less than £2,500 in turnover per person on average, he called that sum “the lie of averages”.
He added: “There are thousands of people who have just joined us, in the last few months, there are people who have joined us in the last week, yesterday. There are others who are opening store fronts in the UK. The beauty of our model is that there is such a variation available, such an array of options in terms of your level of investment and commitment and engagement, how much time you’re going to put in.
“So that kind of math doesn’t tell you anything. First of all, you’re holding it up against a standard in the old-fashioned traditional industry. They’re not truly equal. If I were taking up a spot in your high street store, you would expect me to produce at least hundreds of thousands of pounds [per year], if not a million pounds myself, otherwise, I’m costing space.
“This is a different model. It has different measures,” he said. “You have to look at different types of agents in different scenarios to understand the productivity. Everything we do is aimed at increasing the product range, giving them better sales skills, giving them more product.”
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