Several leading agency groups are reporting stellar sales for 2022, along with predictions for a stellar year in 2023.
Travel Experts, a large luxury agency, said it is experiencing a record year, with sales exceeding those in 2019, which was the group’s best year to date.
“Our member advisors have experienced a great surge in sales all year long as client pent-up-demand from two years of the pandemic generated bookings to vacation destinations in the U.S. and around the world,” said Sharon Fake, the host agency’s executive director.
“In August of this year, we have already matched the record sales recorded for the entire year of 2019 and we still have four months to go,” said Ms.Fake.
“Our weekly ARC sales are regularly setting records and corporate travel has yet to fully recover so we anticipate further growth as people start travelling for business again,” said Heather McIntyre, Travel Expert’s director of technology & finance. ‘‘We expect to top $400 million in sales for 2022.”
To deal with growing demand, Travel Experts has been adding new advisor affiliates and staff to help member advisors handle the increase in bookings.
“While we did lose some advisors during the early days of the pandemic, we are now back to pre-COVID numbers and have increased the size of our team to handle the onboarding process,” Ms Fake said.
“In 2022, to meet the demand of a growing list of affiliated advisors we grew our staff by 30% up from 20 to 26 employees.”
Another leading group, Outside Agents reported similarly encouraging news, as did CruiseOne and Dream Vacations.
“We are seeing a high engagement from the agents who are travelling themselves more and sharing a lot on social media. I definitely think they are inspiring their customers to get out there and see the world as well,” said Drew Daly, VP of CruiseOne and Dream Vacations.
