Researching and selecting the right business partner is detrimental to the success of your business.

Are you going to join a company where you will be lost in a sea of hundreds of other franchisees, so you are just a number or are you looking to join a company where you are known as an individual franchisee with individual needs?

A number of our franchisees were highlighting their passion for sustainable travel and wanting to implement ways of giving back to their destination, fantastic but this wasn’t part of our offering.

There are a lot of franchisors who would have said “that’s great you’ll need to research and implement this yourself, we don’t have anything to support” but that’s not how we operate at The Holiday Franchise Company, you have a voice and we listen.

Now more than ever securing the future of travel has never been so important, so knowing we had a part to play, we started our research on what we could do to support our franchisees implement this into their businesses.

There are a lot of companies doing this type of work but as mentioned research is key, after many Zoom calls we had found one of our partners, The Travel Foundation, what we liked was that they weren’t just trying to put plasters on the symptoms, but they were going straight to tackling the main cause which is going to have a greater impact and the tools they had fitted perfectly into our new e-learning platform.

But there was a challenge, we needed to donate money to partner and support the cause, cashflow is a challenge for a travel business in a pandemic when the world has been closed, the easy option would to be say we can’t progress at this time, but again that’s not how we operate.

We created a staged plan to raise funds, starting with annual fundraising, creating new sections on our networks websites to promote sustainable travel and links to the donation pages to building into our sales process and systems so we could do as part of the booking process. We also created ambassadors’ roles to help embed this into our culture and help educate others.

We had a plan but we needed support to ensure we could deliver. When we launched out the partnership opportunity to our franchisees, their responses blew us away, they stepped up and pledged their alliance, we didn’t realise how many of the team this was so important to, so as a team we have made this happen.

Franchising is a two-way partnership, your franchisor is there to support you, but they too will need your support.

From having conversations with three franchisees, we have implemented a partnership that is going to make a difference to every franchisee and to the industry worldwide.

We can’t always say yes, if it’s not right for the franchisee or their business, but know you can come to us and share your ideas and we will listen and implement where we can.

You’re not a number you’re a partner.