TORONTO — The Travel Agent Next Door is looking for travel agency owners with sales of up to $2 million a year who want to concentrate on selling and spend less time on administration.

“If you are sitting on the fence about whether to close because, even though you love the business but you aren’t making any money, give us a call,” says founder Flemming Friisdahl.

The Travel Agent Next Door is celebrating its six-month mark this week signing up more than 60 independent travel agents, with more in the discussion stages, and hiring its ninth employee.

“We are ahead of our projections for independent travel agents and are excited to be officially launching our new program for travel agencies,” said Friisdahl.

The Travel Agent Next Door is introducing its new Agency Support Program, designed for travel agency owners who are looking to ease out of the back office and administrative side of operating an agency.

“A lot of owners really love selling travel and working with their customers but don’t love the headaches or the amount of time it takes to deal with the back office and admin,” said Friisdahl. “We now offer a program that takes all that away from them for a very moderate cost. The biggest upside is that the agencies that have joined to-date have found that, based on the same sales prior to joining, they take home more money, so it is truly a win win. They used to find all that side of the business draining, and they are thrilled to let us do it so they can concentrate on sales.”

Friisdahl said one agency owner said she will see annual savings of more than $22,000 plus earn $12,000 more in commissions.

Through the program agency owners can get support for telephony, insurance, registrations, membership fees, banking fees, errors and omission, merchant fees and all the back office functions, including taking care of paying the agency’s outside agents if required. And agents only have to select the services that meet their specific needs while they stay who they are and manage themselves.

“We also provide a website with a booking engine and we are the only agency support network offering a cruise booking engine, as well as tours and excursions, and we also have the Softvoyage, car, hotel and insurance booking engine,” he said. “We offer all this for a lot less than the agency could possibly do it for.”

He added that “agency owners tell us they find our offer is the most beneficial to them financially, with the ability to earn up to 100% on supplier commission,” he said.

“Check us out. You have nothing to lose. Our business is to look after the agency owner so their business is to look after their customers.”

He said The Travel Agent Next Door was created to fully support the retail travel industry, specializing in the home based travel agent, medium to small size agencies, and agencies that would like to start their own home based business. Through an affiliation with TRAVELSAVERS and the Affluent Traveler Collection, The Travel Agent Next Door has access to a broad range of programs, in addition to its own features. The company has a head office in downtown Toronto and a branch office in Vancouver, with BCCP, ACTA, TICO, CLIA and IATA designations. To contact The Travel Agent Next Door, visit thetravelagentnextdoor.ca or call 416-367-TAND (8263).