The Advantage Travel Partnership has seen a 40% rise in membership enquiries year-on-year with particular growth in conversions of Advantage Managed Services (AMS) and home working members.
The increased level of interest in the UK’s largest consortium of independent travel agents follows action by Advantage to fight their corner from the onset of the Covid crisis, including government lobbying and media briefings.
The group has particularly highlighted issues such as furlough, the traffic light system and testing requirements.
The consortium also increased communication with members, provided webinars to tackle issues from refunds to re-openings.
The organisation has also welcomed two new members from Australia into its international network WIN.
The Bay Travel Group and FBI Travel bring the total number of global members to 91 with representation across 82 countries.
Leisure director Kelly Cookes said: “We are especially seeing an increase in enquiries and subsequent conversions of AMS members. Our AMS product is unique in the marketplace with all customer monies protected in trust and a franchise Atol option.
“Our trust facility provides an additional level of security not only for our members but also for customers.
“This has been an incredibly tough year and throughout we have tried to adapt our services to best support our members and hopefully get them through the tough times and into a period of recovery.”
New member Natasha Mouscos added: “We recently joined Advantage and we have found that all the team have been very supportive, we are already seeing the commercial benefits to joining and the security of operating within a consortium is great for us”.