Most franchise opportunities come with a monthly fee, but exactly what is it for? That’s what this blog explains along with how we give you a break in the beginning.

Our monthly fee is £155. But did you know that you don’t actually start paying this straight away?

Our business set-up time is around 14 weeks. During that time, you won’t be sat on your hands, you’ll be completing our one to one training program, creating your website and getting your business ready for launch.

We know that during this time you won’t have an opportunity to earn through your business so we don’t charge the monthly fee during this time.

But there’s more…

We also know that new businesses take a while to gain some traction. We wouldn’t expect you to be making £30k-£40k of bookings in the first couple of months (this has happened but we’d rather err on the side of caution) so after your business has gone live, we give you another three months grace period.

And there’s more…

You choose when you go live.

We know that most people that join us have pretty full-on, full-time jobs, and setting up a travel business in the evenings and weekends around this and family life, can seem daunting if it’s rushed.

So when you join us, your business will take a minimum of 14 weeks to be ready to trade, but if you want longer, that’s fine. We had a franchisee join us in June 2020, but didn’t want to start trading until Jan 2021.

So instead of having to put pressure on themselves to cram everything into three months of evenings and weekends, they decided to spread it out over 6 months.

They’ll have the 6-month setup time with no fees, they’ll go live in January, have January, February, and March with no fees, and they’ll start paying them in April.

What are the monthly fees actually for?

This covers quite a lot, and when you break it down, it’s actually great value.

First of all, there’s the direct head office support. Unlike other franchises in the market, we do not operate a mentor program, where we ask you to rely on another franchise, someone who is probably new to travel as well.

For everything you need, our head office team are there to support you. You just need to visit our testimonials page to see what it means to our franchisees.

It also covers the hosting of your website and emails, text messages through our system, and access to the system itself. The system has been built by us with you in mind.

Rather than use an existing system (which have a bit of a rep for being a bit 80’s), we took the early decision to build of own Customer Management Console. The CMC is filled with features to help with the smooth and efficient running of your business.

One of the questions I’m often asked is about how franchisees manage the admin that comes along with running a travel business. Well, the system does a lot of that for you.

Sending automatic emails when an enquiry is placed on your website, tailored to your business, generating automatic receipts, ATOL certificates, automatically processing payments directly through to Hays Travel Independence Group, sending balance reminders to the customer and generating reminders for you.

This cloud-based system allows you to make bookings from anywhere, anytime.

The monthly fee also covers proactive support from our head office in the form of our sales technique training, Hear to Help. In these sessions, our amazing support team offer to listen to your calls with you and make suggestions on how to improve your sales. With years of experience selling holidays, these sessions are truly valuable and again, you can hear this in the testimonials we receive. These sessions often lead directly to sales. I’ve never worked with people so passionate about helping others improve.

Also covered is access to our superb ‘industry leading’ training system, Journey to Success Portal. This is a hugely powerful tool, which you will love having available at your fingertips. Take a look at the reaction of franchise professionals when we showed them a demo, along with the full demo here.

You’re also covered for public indemnity insurance until your business is turning over £1m at which point you can either take out your own premium, or contribute to ours, but at that point, a few extra pounds a month won’t really be an issue for you. 

There are constant training webinars that you’ll be able to attend and brush up on destinations or different holidays types. We arrange them, all you need to do is turn up ready to learn.

Then there’s evolution. As a franchise, we won’t sit still. This year alone we have added a huge amount of value to our proposition with new partnerships, including partnerships with Everymind, The Travel Foundation, Insurefor.com, Bagsahead and Trees for Travel.

Everymind enables us to give access to essential mental health education and support through the use of the Everymind mobile application and bespoke webinars. Our head office team are trained mental health champions who are passionate about creating a healthy culture in the community.

We are on a mission to normalise mental health conversations in the workplace, through technology. We take a proactive approach to mental wellbeing at work.

The Travel Foundation, a leading charity that works in partnership with businesses and governments so that tourism brings greater benefits for people and the environment.

Tourism is a unique opportunity. By its very nature, it values the things that are most precious in our world: stunning landscapes, wildlife, history, culture and people. Tourism can be a catalyst for growth in the local economy, providing good quality jobs, opportunities for enterprise and funds for conservation. But if it is not managed well, tourism can have negative impacts on local communities and environments, creating long term problems for local residents, which can ultimately lead to the decline of tourism in the destination. Currently, there is no measurement of the net impact that tourism is having on destinations meaning that negative impacts are often not identified until they have developed into big issues.

At The Holiday Franchise Company, we believe we have a responsibility to promote sustainable travel, which helps benefit local people and helps protect the beautiful environments that our franchisee sends their customers to.

Our vision is for a travelling future where we continue to explore & experience our amazing world but with a slower, more thoughtful approach, whilst simultaneously planting trees, restoring ecosystems & maintaining those forests to remove CO2 from the air. This simple, yet powerful act, can & will help reverse climate change, creating a safe sustainable future planet.

This is why we have decided to partner with Trees 4 Travel. We know there are many CO2 Offsetting programs, but we feel they’re a bit like throwing a coin into a well & making a wish, without knowing what actually really happens to that coin.

Trees4Travel offers something tangible, understandable & affordable – something that we can all see, be proud of & watch grow. Trees 4 travel aim to offset your carbon footprint for your holiday within 10 years. The trees you plant help create new future forests for our planet, BUT Trees 4 travel go that ‘extra mile’, combining your tree purchases with certified carbon credits for the conservation of established forests around the world.

IGLTA is the world’s leading network of LGBTQ+ welcoming tourism businesses. They work to promote equality and safety within LGBTQ+ tourism worldwide, we want to support and showcase our model is open to all.