A few years ago, the people in this blog were exactly where you might be right now. Googling travel franchises late at night, reading stories like this one and wondering whether someone like them could really make it work. A midwife from Doncaster. A teacher. A couple running a fish and chip shop in the Lake District. A single mum who spent ten whole years deciding whether to take the leap.
Last weekend, every one of them collected an award in front of hundreds of their fellow consultants.
The awards evening at our Summer Celebration 2026 recognised the Not Just Travel consultants who have gone above and beyond over the past year, whether that is delivering outstanding customer experiences, growing their business, championing a specialist area or making a real difference to the people around them. Not Just Travel is the consumer-facing brand of The Travel Franchise, the name our consultants trade under when they book holidays for their customers.
We wanted to share their stories, not just their trophies, because their backgrounds matter more than their results. Nearly all of them joined with no travel experience at all, and the distance between where they started and where they stood last weekend is the best answer we can give to the question every prospective franchisee quietly asks themselves. Could that really be me? Read on and decide for yourself.
Customer Experience Champion 2026: David
David spent a lifetime in human resources overseas before moving back to the UK, where he quickly realised he hated his job and wanted to work for himself. Someone told him to either earn a living from golf or become a travel agent, and since he could not play golf, he joined The Travel Franchise in 2014. He became our very first Money-Back Challenge winner, earning his entire franchise fee back in just six months.
More than a decade later, David has earned over £1 million in commission, been crowned Leisure Agent of the Year by the prestigious industry newspaper Travel Weekly and built a business that runs on an astonishing 87 per cent repeat custom. He has visited 136 countries and counting, and there have been stretches where he spent more time abroad than at home, booking holidays for clients from Ibiza, Mexico, Zanzibar and Cyprus along the way. His clients love how much he travels, because every trip sharpens the advice he gives them.
His philosophy is exactly what this award recognises. He will not book a holiday without speaking to the client first, because the relationship is the whole point. His customers know they can reach him at any time, which means that when something goes wrong abroad, they call him rather than suffering in silence and complaining afterwards. His biggest single booking captures his style perfectly. A lady rang to share the good news of her divorce settlement and told him her budget was more than he could possibly imagine spending. His answer was challenge accepted, and that same evening she spent £160,000 on a three month trip including a cruise to Australia.
His advice for anyone starting out is simple. Think about what you would want from a travel agent, then provide more.
Cruise Champion of the Year 2026: Gemma
If you want to understand how big cruise has become, Gemma’s last twelve months are a good place to start. During the P&O Cruises 2027 itinerary launch she secured over £330,000 in bookings in just three days. Within four weeks she was approaching half a million pounds in total holiday sales, 99 per cent of which were cruises. She personally handled 78 bookings in seven days, booked over 100 cabins and completed 123 bookings, making her one of the top performing P&O Cruises consultants in the entire country.
What tells you even more about her is what she did when demand surged during that launch. She cancelled her own luxury break to make sure every single customer was looked after. That combination of expertise and commitment is why her clients trust her to get it right every time, from choosing the best cabin to planning the perfect itinerary, and it is why nobody in the room was surprised when her name was read out.
Cruise is one of the fastest growing and most profitable areas in all of travel, and you do not need to arrive as a specialist the way Gemma’s clients might assume she did. Our dedicated Cruise Division, masterclasses, ship visits and supplier events train consultants to become cruise experts from a standing start.
Short-Haul Travel Champion 2026: Dale
Dale spent more than 25 years in financial services before joining us, and his story since then is one of the best adverts for this business we could possibly write. He won the Money-Back Challenge in December, meaning we refunded his entire £14,995 Elite franchise fee, and he decided to spend his prize on something extraordinary.
He and his friend Lucy had made it to the final stages of selection for the Race Across the World TV series, surviving months of video submissions, phone interviews and face to face meetings, only to miss the final cut. Rather than sulk about it, they planned their own trip around the world instead. Dale left the UK in January and has since travelled through Sri Lanka, South Korea, Mongolia and Japan, with Thailand, Bali, Australia, Fiji, New Zealand and the Americas still to come.
The remarkable part is that his business has come with him. He has taken more than 74 bookings since leaving the UK, including 21 in March alone, working around UK time zones with a part time concierge manager back home covering the moments when Mongolian internet lets him down. He has met fellow consultants at Disney and Universal to sharpen his product knowledge, and he is meeting clients at the Breeders’ Cup in San Diego before joining two of his customers on a Royal Caribbean cruise out of Miami, at their invitation.
After 25 years in finance, he says no other career could have given him this. His plan on returning is to build a small team under his own brand, and he has already recommended the business to a school friend, who has since joined and is building her own business part time.
Social Impact Award 2026: Sarah
Sarah joined us back in 2016 after years working in fashion. She sat down one day and brainstormed what she was good at, what she liked and what she enjoyed, and realised the answer pointed somewhere very specific. She had always wanted her own business, she wanted the freedom to work wherever and whenever she chose, and she loved planning holidays. The Travel Franchise sat exactly at the intersection of all three.
She started part time, keeping her fashion job three days a week while she built her customer base, and went full time in 2019 once the business could carry her. Today her business runs largely on repeat customers and word of mouth referrals, topped up by social media, where her advice to newer consultants is to make it personal and personable, so people realise they are not following a faceless travel page but a real person who is going to help them.
She has said she could never go back to working for someone else, and this year she is being recognised for the difference she makes well beyond the bookings. Nobody who knows Sarah was surprised to see her name on this trophy.
Sustainability Champion 2026: Lisette
Lisette joined with her husband Liam as a partnership, taking advantage of the fact that one franchise fee can support two people building a business together. Both came from the events industry with no travel experience at all. Liam kept his full time job and helped around it, while Lisette worked part time and spent the rest of her week growing their travel business, with a long term plan to take it full time for them both.
Their very first customers were a family member and her friend, who booked a river cruise on the Rhine, and the business has grown steadily from there. Along the way they have been on the Ski Society trip to Aspen and Lisette has completed the Elite Experience in Mauritius, learning to grow the business while experiencing Beachcomber’s resorts first hand.
This year Lisette is being recognised for championing sustainability across the business, an area that matters more to travellers with every passing year, and one she has made genuinely her own.
Family Travel Expert of the Year 2026: Ellie
Ellie was a primary school teacher when an Instagram ad first sparked her curiosity. She attended two Discovery days, met co-founder Paul Harrison and was reassured by the level of support on offer, so she left the classroom and joined on the Elite package. She has said many times that she never feels like a salesperson, because the job is really about taking care of people and finding them the right holiday. It seems fitting that the former teacher is now our Family Travel Expert of the Year, helping families make memories rather than marking books.
NJT Rising Star 2026: Amy
Amy spent 15 years in financial services doing work she describes as being as boring as it sounds, commuting endlessly between London and Leeds in a career she had fallen into straight out of university rather than chosen. Then a cruise holiday to Greece changed everything. Somewhere out at sea she had the epiphany that she should be the one booking the holidays, since friends were forever asking for her travel advice anyway.
She joined in July 2024 and built the business as a side hustle around her demanding corporate job, and the results were staggering. Just under £1 million in sales in her first full year, a £50,000 Maldives booking from a friend who remembered what she did, a £40,000 luxury trip generated through a partnership she built with the owner of a 20,000 member travel Facebook group, and the Money-Back Challenge completed within her first year, returning her entire £14,995 franchise fee. By December 2025 she no longer needed the corporate job and left it behind, along with London and the commute, for a new life in rural Kent. She has already passed £650,000 in sales this year, and the people around her say she lights up when she talks about travel. The Rising Star award recognises that she is only just getting going.
Outstanding Performance, University: Suzy
Suzy’s story is one for inspiration and strength. After 30 years in hospitality, she discovered The Travel Franchise and then spent a full ten years watching Not Just Travel grow before finally joining in 2021. As a widow and the sole breadwinner for her son Carter, the decision carried real weight, and she made every year of waiting count.
Despite joining during the pandemic, she built a business on extraordinary service, with 95 per cent of her clients coming from repeat bookings and referrals. She cheerfully admits to being terrible at social media, and it has not held her back for a second. Her biggest bookings tell the story, including a £62,000 fortieth birthday trip to Jumby Bay, a private island off the coast of Antigua, and she has had months where her pay cheque topped £10,000. Her dream is for Carter to eventually join her in the business, and preferably take over the social media. In her own words, she only wishes she had done it sooner. Her Outstanding Performance award proves that the best time to begin is simply when you are ready.
Retail Champions 2026: Matt and Ashley Phillips
Matt and Ashley, better known across the industry as the Travel Chaps, might have the best backstory in the whole network. In 2018 they left their big corporate jobs in London, sold their house and bought a fish and chip shop in the Lake District. When they sold that award-winning business in 2022, they realised the thing they were truly hooked on was travel, found The Travel Franchise online and never looked back.
They threw themselves into it with the energy of people who had run businesses before, watching one or two training webinars a day to build their travel knowledge, working wedding fairs, branding their car with a QR code for passers by and completing the Money-Back Challenge within their first year. Today they have one of the most recognisable businesses in our entire network, complete with a high street presence. They are TTG Top Weddings and Honeymoons Agency winners, they were shortlisted across multiple categories at this year’s Agent Achievement Awards and the trade press regularly comes to them for comment. When the UAE reopened earlier this month, it was Ashley that Travel Weekly quoted on the surge in demand. Their tagline is Honest, Fabulous Holidays, and their Retail Champion award recognises a business that keeps setting the standard.
Spirit of Not Just Travel: Anne
Some awards are about numbers, and some are about something harder to measure. The Spirit of Not Just Travel award goes to the person who embodies what this community is about, and this year it went to Anne.
Anne was a midwife for 18 years and still keeps her hand in with the NHS part time, because as she puts it, she is not quite ready to hang up her hat. Her friends have long called her Judith, after Judith Chalmers, because of her passion for travelling the world. She joined us straight after recovering from a heart attack, booked more than 17 holidays in her very first month out of training and went on to beat the Money-Back Challenge in under seven months, earning her full £14,995 franchise fee back. She was won New Home-Based Agent of the Year at the TTG Travel Awards last year, a remarkable double for someone still in the early chapters of her business. Her reaction to the weekend says it all. She called it an absolutely brilliant celebration and thanked the team for making it all happen so exceptionally well, which is typical Anne, celebrating everyone else moments after winning herself.
And the rest of our brilliant winners
The full list of champions also includes Michaela Farn, our Insurance Expert of the Year, Eunika Colceag, our Long-Haul Travel Champion, and Kerry McMahon, who took the Outstanding Performance award for the Academy. Every one of them has put in a year of work that made this recognition impossible to ignore, and we could not be prouder of them.
What this list really tells you
Read back through those stories and a pattern jumps out. A human resources professional, a financial services veteran, a fashion buyer, two events managers, a midwife, two fish and chip shop owners, a hospitality veteran and a primary school teacher, all of whom arrived with no travel experience and are now being celebrated as the best in their fields. One of them has earned over £1 million in commission. One took £330,000 in cruise bookings in three days. One is running his business from a twelve month trip around the world. One built a near million pound business as a side hustle around a full time corporate job.
That is not a coincidence. It is what happens when people with drive meet a business that invests properly in training, mentorship and support, and it is the reason The Travel Franchise has been named the Best Lifestyle Franchise in the World two years running. The people on this list started exactly where you are right now. The only real difference is that they started.
