How to become a home-based travel agent

What is more awesome than becoming an independent home-based travel agent where you are the owner of everything? Yes, it is awesome and also money-making.

As the growing competition in all the sectors, competition in the travel agency business also increased. In this case, taking random attempts to become a home-based travel agent will not work. You need to come with proper planning and guidelines. That’s why right here I will discuss how to be a travel agent.

Steps on how to be a travel agent from home:

If you are an experienced person who has complete knowledge about travel agency work then, you can easily take the attempt to be a home-based travel agent. But, if are new to this occupation, you must know how to plan and be a home-based travel agent. Here are the steps on how to be a travel agent from home:

1. Research to find your niche and collect information about your niche:

You can’t be a travel agent within one day. For it, you need to do proper planning and work as your plan. Planning should be started from finding your niche to becoming a successful travel agent. The niche of a travel agency is huge. For example, your niche can be-

• Luxury travel.
• Adventure travel.
• Honeymoon travel.
• family travel.
• Corporate travel.
• Medical tourism.
• Sports tourism and so on.

Before choosing a niche, you should know-

• In which niche you are most interested?
• Proper Knowledge about that niche.
• Finding out the amount of investment you will need for accomplishing your goal.

After choosing your niche, you should now gain all information about that particular niche. These information are all about what you will need and do to provide the best user experience as well as service to your customers.

2. Training and certification that you will need:

When your customers will put trust in you for their trips, you can’t lose their trust. You need to work in every way possible to provide them their expected service. There are many free as well as paid training programs for a home-based travel agent. Besides, you can be a member of the ASTA and ACTA organizations who respectively provide helpful information to American and Canadian users about traveling. Moreover, these organization provides various training programs for their users.

ASTA (Full form is American Society of Travel Advisor):

It is an American organization that works as a travel advisor for travel-seeking peoples. ASTA also helps travel agents to run businesses properly. As it has the world’s best professional travel advisors. Besides, ASTA also provides certification programs for travel agents.

ACTA (Full form is Association of Canadian Travel Agents):

It is an association that provides useful training courses for Canadian peoples. More than 14000 travel agents are the member of this organization and 80% of their booking are done through this organization. It also helps you to know free travel agent business opportunities. Besides, it also provides guides to the people who want to plan for their vacation.

3. Find a host agency:

You can’t be a home-based travel agent if you don’t join with a host agency. There are various host agencies that will help you to sell travel legally. Name of some of the host agencies are:

• Avoya Travel.
• Travel planners international.
• Outside agents.
• Nexion Travel Group.
• Cruise Planner.
• Dugan’s Travel.
• MTravel Hosting Services.
• Dream Vacations.

These hosting agencies will let you work with vendors and manage all your works with them. Moreover, these agencies provide programs for new travel agents, educational programs, and marketing tools. These will help you to build a healthy relationship with vendors.

What should you look into your host agency?

• It should provide good web development and design by that you can create a professional website for your travel agency. Remember one thing your customer will visit your site and see your whole website. If they don’t find it trustworthy, they will never buy a service from you. So, your website should be your first priority.
• A hosting agency that can increase travel booking of your tour packages.
• CRM ( Customer Relationship Management) software should be provided. Because you may want a software program to control all of your consumer records and bookings.
• It must provide you commission management and accounting tools for your business. That will help you to manage your commissions and accounting information.
• Should provide you support for any kind of help.
• A host agency should help you to increase your clients. As it works with a large number of travel agencies. From there it can help you to find more loyal clients.

What qualification you will need to become a travel agent?

There is no specific qualification that you will need for being a travel agent. You can work in a travel agency to know the business more specifically. Besides, here knowing different foreign languages can work as an advantage. Your English writing and speaking need to be good.

Basically, anyone can be a travel agent if he/ she has good knowledge about travel agencies and their tour booking system. Moreover, you will need no fees for becoming a travel agent who will work from home. Here, good geographical knowledge can help you to become a travel agent who can complete all work online.

Being a travel agent is worthy or not?

Ofcourse, it is. As market share of travel agencies are increasing day by day. Though it is reduced due to covid-19. But, it is predicted that demand of a travel agency will increase more after this covid period.

It has found that the global travel agency market hit 744 billion US dollars in 2019. But, due to covid case, it has reduced in 2020. Source name- Statista.com

By seeing the global market size, you can assume how much worth it is. Your dream of how to become a home-based travel agent for free can come true. As it is not that impossible to become a successful tour operator.