Dean and Simon are two years into their journey with The Travel Franchise and the numbers speak for themselves.
During this year’s Peaks season they completed a month with 37 bookings and just under £120,000 in holiday sales, and since the start of this year they have already added over £20,000 in future commission to their pipeline. They have a team behind them, a new office and a business that feels, as Dean puts it, like a real business conversation without even realising it. But none of that arrived overnight and the story of how they got here is worth telling, because it did not start with a grand plan or a background in running a travel agency. It started with the same thing that starts most good businesses: a question that was too obvious to ignore.
Who they are and why they started
Dean spent twenty years in various corners of the travel industry, starting as a holiday rep overseas before moving into management and UK airports. Before that he had been an estate agent. Simon came from a completely different world, twenty seven years in retail HR, with a stint as a holiday rep overseas somewhere in the middle. That is actually how they met, back in 2002, working as reps.
For years people had been coming to them for advice on where to go on holiday, what hotels to book, which destinations were worth the journey. They were the people everyone turned to in their circle, and all of that knowledge and enthusiasm was going out completely for free. The question of why they were not getting paid for it became harder and harder to ignore.
“It sort of came to the point where we thought, well, actually, why don’t we do that? And then we can cash in on that rather than giving away this free advice,” says Dean.
For Simon, there was another dimension to it. After nearly three decades in the corporate world, commuting into London and spending evenings and weekends on work that he didn’t enjoy, something needed to change. He wanted to build something of his own.
They joined The Travel Franchise in December 2023. The Travel Franchise is the business behind Not Just Travel, the consumer-facing brand under which all consultants trade, and one of the most awarded travel franchise operations in the UK. Within two years Dean and Simon had a team, a new office and results that reflect exactly what is possible when two people with the right attitude find the right model behind them.
The Money-Back Challenge: hit in seven months
Dean and Simon paid the Elite franchise fee in full from day one specifically to qualify for the Money-Back Challenge. The challenge works like this: earn a set level of commission within your first twelve months and The Travel Franchise refunds the entire franchise fee in full, meaning the business effectively costs nothing. They hit the target in seven months.
They kept a handwritten running total of where they were and where they needed to be each week, tracking every booking and every commission payment against the target. As their experience grew and their enquiries started converting more consistently, the business began to grow on its own momentum through recommendations and repeat bookings from clients who had enjoyed their experience and wanted to come back.
“There was no way we were never going to not hit that. We were determined we were going to do it. Don’t get me wrong, we had times where we were like, God, this is tough. But then we got there and we had time to spare,” comments Simon.
The retreats that changed how they think about the business
Three or four months into the business, Dean and Simon attended the Millionaire’s Retreat in Fuerteventura. It was their first real exposure to the wider Not Just Travel community and to the kind of coaching and guidance that these trips are designed to provide. Meeting other consultants at a similar stage, hearing about what was working for them, and getting practical input on overcoming the barriers they were facing as newer consultants made a meaningful difference to how they approached the business in the months that followed.
The Elite Experience in Mauritius came later and nearly did not happen for both of them. The Elite package includes one funded place and Dean was taking it. Simon had already made peace with the idea of spending the week on the receiving end of Mauritius photographs when a spare place came up at the last minute.
“We said this is probably a once in a lifetime trip because we probably won’t go back to Mauritius. Oh my God, how wrong was I? Because we’re definitely going to go back. We fell in love with it,” says Simon.
Beyond the island itself, what the trip gave them professionally was clarity. Dean describes every retreat as a reset, a structured opportunity to revisit the fundamentals and check whether anything important had slipped during the busy periods.
“We all think we know what we’re doing and we do to a certain extent. But we just revisit things that we may have let slip where you get busy on certain things, especially in peaks. And it just reminds you.” – Dean
Both the Millionaire’s Retreat and the Elite Experience are included as standard in the Elite package at no extra cost. They are not perks or rewards for top performers. They are a deliberate and integral part of how The Travel Franchise develops its consultants, designed to give people the environment, the coaching and the peer community they need to move their business forward in a way that no webinar or training session alone can replicate. For Dean and Simon, both trips delivered exactly that.
They have since completed two Seminars at Sea, the cruise-based training events run for Not Just Travel consultants. The first was on Virgin Voyages and the commercial impact was immediate. Having experienced the product from the inside, eating in every restaurant, drinking in every bar and watching the entertainment, they came back and sold eight Virgin cruises. Dean is clear that without the experience, they would not have sold one.
The following year they attended the Fred Olsen Seminar at Sea, a completely different product for a completely different type of client. They came back knowing precisely who their Fred customers were and went on to sell Fred alongside Virgin, building a cruise business they could not have built from a brochure alone.
Why more and more people are choosing to book with a travel consultant
One of the things that Dean and Simon are most thoughtful about is the service they provide to their clients, and it tells you a great deal about why the demand for personal travel consultants is growing rather than declining.
When a client travels, Dean and Simon track their flight in real time and send a message letting them know their departure slot if there is a delay, the kind of detail the client would never expect. They check in when the client arrives at the hotel. They send boarding passes electronically or post them for those who prefer a physical copy. When clients return home they receive a welcome back card alongside a small pack of tea, coffee and milk, the kind of thoughtful gesture that gets shared on social media and consistently sends new enquiries their way.
People book holidays online every day, but what they cannot find online is someone who knows them, has thought about what they specifically need, will be there when something goes wrong and will still be thinking about them when they land at their destination. That is what Dean and Simon provide and it is why so many of their clients never go back to booking alone.
“They’re surprised that you’re checking in, because a lot of travel agents would have left them as soon as they’d booked it.” – Dean
When things go wrong, which occasionally they do, their approach is the same. A client once sent Dean a photo of a collapsed hotel room ceiling within moments of receiving his check-in message. He stayed calm, asked her to go to breakfast while he called the hotel and had everything sorted within an hour. She had a wonderful holiday and has booked with them ever since.
“Things can go wrong, that’s life. But it’s about facing into them and helping. It can actually work in your advantage because you show your worth even more. And if you look after that customer in the right way, they absolutely come back to you.” – Simon
This is precisely why the demand for personal travel consultants has grown so significantly in recent years. In an age where booking a holiday online is easier than ever, the experience of having something go wrong without anyone to call is also more common than ever. Dean and Simon’s clients know that whatever happens, someone who genuinely cares about their trip is only a message away. That reassurance, more than any price comparison or promotional offer, is what keeps people coming back year after year. Their biggest booking to date, a business class trip to Australia for a family of four with stops in Singapore and Hong Kong worth £37,000, did not come from an advertisement. It came from a relationship built on trust, one booking at a time.
Two years in, still learning, still growing
Dean and Simon will be the first to tell you that two years is not a long time in this business and that they are still learning every day. What they have built in that time, a growing team, a new office, a six-figure Peaks season, a cruise business they could not have imagined when they started, has come from following a model that works, using the support that is available and treating the business seriously from the very beginning.
Their story is for anyone who has ever given away free travel advice, wondered whether their love of travel could become something more, or simply decided they had spent long enough building something for someone else. If that sounds familiar, the link below is where the next chapter starts.
