You Say It’s Your Birthday

The Travel Agent Next Door celebrates its 7th birthday today (March 19) and the innovative host agency has sold over $500 million in sales over the 7 years — and now has 508 Primary Agents and 380 Associate Agents and 45 staff supporting those agents, giving them the highest ratio of support staff to agents in the industry.

The company has also graduated 200 plus new agents from its in-house travel school, ensuring we keep the travel industry growing.

Founder Flemming Friisdahl observed: “We are extremely proud of how far we have come in 7 years. We were a start-up and everyone on our team has worked incredibly hard to bring us to where we are today– but of course we would not exist if it were not for the suppliers who believed in us– and our partners– independent travel agents— we work for them.”

The company has introduced a number of “firsts” among host agencies for its agents, including:

• The ONLY online system enabling the agent to charge a cancellation fee or a “planning to go” fee or any fee to accommodate agents who want to charge fees.
• The ONLY host agency to have 18 hours of ticketing support 6 days per week and no ticketing fees on any issuing of the ticket
• The ONLY online system for agents to send a trip authorization online to verify birthday, passport expiration date, credit card charges, insurance waiver and include customized Terms and Conditions including suppliers T&Cs
• The ONLY host agency to have developed its own proprietary websites where agents can easily customize 90% of the site themselves.
• The ONLY host agency developing its own version of a group module which can collect the customer’s credit card and personal information and still be PCI compliant.
• And all of the above is included at no extra cost to TTAND partners.

TTAND also launched The Agency Solution – a program for small and medium travel agencies who are looking to get out from under all the paper work and back-end tasks of running an agency– and concentrate on selling travel.

Said Friisdahl: “This past year has of course been a year like none of us has ever seen in our industry. We have concentrated on supporting our agents through this period and have had a number of agents join TTAND this past year.  We will be ready when the rebound comes—and there are already strong signals that it is coming.”

The Travel Agent Next Door has held many initiatives to keep its agents engaged and to give back, in particular over the past year.  The company’s charity of choice is Pencils for Kids and over the 7 years, TTAND and its partners have raised $79,571 for the charity.

This past holiday season, TTAND and its partners sponsored 48 travel agent partners and their families who were struggling financially due to the pandemic.

Go to www.thetravelagentnextdoor.ca for more.