He’s an Irish cycling champion who worked in his father’s fish and chip shop from the age of nine. He was the runner up of The Apprentice 2011 and is now the Global Sales Director with Travel Counsellors. Northern Ireland Travel News grabbed a coffee and a chat with JIM EASTWOOD when he visited Belfast for the annual Travel Counsellors Conference…
With an average 22 years travel experience and more than 1,900 Travel Counsellors worldwide who all take enormous pride in what they do it’s no wonder that Travel Counsellors are continually rated top for service.
Q: Jim, you’ve served as the Global Sales Director for Travel Counsellors since March 2017. This was your first foray into travel, what attracted you to the travel industry?
A: I was attracted by the Travel Counsellors brand and model. I was happy and progressing where I was at, but when I was approached about joining Travel Counsellors, the core brand model is something that really stood out to me. It’s based around some great core values – care and people. Lots of businesses say that they care for their customers, but for Travel Counsellors that is the core of the business model. We want to be the most loved travel business in the world and that means caring, that means basing our business around care and people. For us that is the ideal business model. We believe in caring more than anyone else. That means we have over 400 support staff in seven countries caring for almost 2,000 travel counsellor members globally and attracting the right type of business owners who will care for their customers and clients more than anyone else.
Q: Have you travelled much yourself? I have been fortunate to travel fairly extensively and I also travel a lot with work.
A: For the last 12 years, I have been what people call ‘a super commuter’. I live in Northern Ireland, but for the last 12 years I’ve been travelling elsewhere for work – Dublin, London, Switzerland, America and our head office in is in Manchester, but we are in seven countries as far flung as Australia so I cover a lot of ground.
Q: Following the collapse of Thomas Cook, did you get many ex-Thomas Cook staff joining the Travel counsellors family?
A: The Thomas Cook collapse was extremely unfortunate, but prior to that about 30 per cent of our Travel Counsellors were ex-Thomas Cook staff at some point. To have a company who were that big and that long established, and travel being that close-knit a community, you are inevitably going to have a lot of people already from Thomas Cook. The ex-Thomas Cook staff who have now joined us are now saying that this was the trigger that they needed to make the move. They are also saying they are amongst friends here, because they are joining colleagues who they have worked with in the past as well. There are three ways in which we have attempted to support Thomas Cook staff after the collapse. Our mission is to be the most loved travel company in the world, and in order to live up to that we put on a series of care events for Thomas Cook staff around the UK. They were extremely well attended and we provided career advice to anyone whether or not they wanted to join Travel Counsellors. Among those top and super performers at Thomas Cook who did get that trigger to join Travel Counsellors, they wanted options and opportunity. Even if Travel Counsellors wasn’t the right fit for everyone we still gave them the information they needed to make an informed choice no matter what they ended up doing.
Q: Was it much of a learning curve joining the travel industry? What have you learned since starting your role with Travel Counsellors?
A: It’s a fantastic industry. It’s multi-facetted. We have 1,900 Travel Counsellor members and no two Travel Counsellors are the same. From leisure, corporate, male or female – they could come from non-travel backgrounds like our Academy Travel Counsellors do they could come from having 35 years experience in travel industry like many of the top performers from Thomas Cook that we have now attracted as well – no two Travel Counsellors are the same. I’ve learned a lot about the industry. Depending on what you want to do and how you want to grow your business you can have a home with Travel Counsellors.
Q: What changes, if any, have you made in the company over the past two years?
A: Overall the leisure travel industry in the uk is affected by external factors, however our growth over the last 12 months has been double digit, in excess of 10 percent in leisure travel, which has significantly bucked the trend. From a corporate perspective it has been almost 20 percent year-on-year, which more than significantly bucks the trend. We have business owners not employees and our business owners want to grow and scale. We have brought that to the surface and provided skills programmes and tools to enable them to take their business to the next level. We do that by leveraging technology. We have the opportunity for Travel Counsellors to be truly entrepreneurial and work how they want to work. We are not a home working business, we provide flexible working options to entrepreneurs, people who are passionate about travel and for travel experts. You could be a Travel Counsellor and work from home or you could be a Travel Counsellor and have an office and employ five people. You could be a Travel Counsellor who works with multiple other Travel Counsellors and deals with a large premier league football club and books all of their travel. Travel Counsellors arrange themselves in ways that allow them to scale and grow and do what is right for their customers and clients. We have a massive spectrum of clients in terms of size and spend, and also in terms of how Travel Counsellors support those clients.
Q: What makes Travel Counsellor different from high street travel agents?
A: There are a few things. Firstly we provide a home for people who are passionate about travel but have no experience via our Academy. We are fast becoming the travel university. Secondly, we have our own propriety technology, PHENIX, that is for and influenced by Travel Counsellors. We have built this customised and bespoke system which houses a complete eco-system in which our Travel Counsellors can operate. They have a complete end-to-end view of all their customers, from booking to customer behaviours, trends and customer expectations. If you are running a business you need all that information at your fingertips and PHENIX gives this. People want to work how they want to work. Customers don’t have a 9-5 mentality. They want to access information and expertise it a time that suits them. We have a collective network of unrivalled expertise in terms of knowledge and experience and how we share that and educate our Travel Counsellors through our e-learning platform, COACH provides accessibility to the client. Truly personalised service. We care, with us it’s personal, and to be truly personal you can’t switch off at 5pm, you have to be available and support your customers through the whole journey, which doesn’t end at booking. We build relationships, we keep in touch with customers long after they have travelled.
Q: What does it take to become a Travel Counsellor?
A: We have five routes of entry to become a Travel Counsellor. We have Academy for people who have a passion for travel but have never worked in travel before; we have travel trade, people who have worked in travel but never sold travel; we have return to travel, people who were previously in travel but wanted a change of career than were lured back; leisure such as ex-Thomas Cook or Trailfinder staff; then we have the corporates, people coming from Travel Management Companies – its the fastest growing element of our business. However the key ingredients across all the routes of entry are ‘I want to own my own business’, entrepneuruls, people who want serve and support thei customers as best as they can and build relationships. The people of human to human assisted travel has never been more prevalent.
Q: You are known to fans of the Apprentice as ‘Jedi Jim’ due to your persuasive abilities. How would you recommend Travel Counsellors and other travel industry professionals use your skills as a model to increase their own selling ability?
A: It’s not difficult to be passionate about travel. When you think about sales in general, not everyone has this amazing product to sell, you are selling the most attractive thing in the world because you are literally selling the world. Travel makes people smile, it makes them happy and when you put across your passion for travel, the places you have been and the experiences you have provided other people, when you hear these and they are brought to life through images and the words of any travel professional, you’re sold. Knowledge is very important as that gives confidence to the client.
Q: What was it like working with Lord Alan Sugar? Did you learn anything from him which has helped you in your current role?
A: Would you believe that was 2011? I learned a lot, as disappointed as I was not to win I realised that being from Northern Ireland is unique, being part of the UK and being on the island of Ireland, I realised that as a country, and as individuals, we have so much going for ourselves. The main thing I learned was not to be hindered by our humility and actually know that we have a lot to be proud and confident about without having to be brassy and arrogant.
