Hire a Travel Agent for Your Travels
Independent travel agents can make domestic and international travel far less stressful, working on behalf of businesses and private clients to coordinate logistics, details, and scheduling to streamline trips and develop detailed travel itineraries.
Whether you’d like to hire a travel agent to coordinate a complex work retreat, handle the travel arrangements for groups of international visitors, or plan a tour to incorporate specific areas, a remote travel agent is flexible and has the autonomy to make travel recommendations, suggest airlines, and recommend providers based on their experience and knowledge.
Let’s look at our top tips for finding the best Guru travel professionals, prioritizing the skills that will be most valuable to you, and some of the requirements you can include in a freelance travel agent description.
What Does a Freelance Travel Agent Do?
The role of a travel agent is to take over the administration of organizing all aspects of your travel requirements, including:
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Scheduling and itineraries
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Transfers and onward travel
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Bookings and reservations
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Accommodating dietary and other requirements
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Rescheduling flights and transport
Some travel agents specialize in specific destinations and speak the local language, providing you or your business team with a liaison to manage your trip and ensure everything is tailored to your needs. Other travel agents operate as freelance travel experts or may focus on certain types of travel, such as corporate travel planning or sustainable travel. As a customer, you can find a travel agent that best fits your business needs.
Hiring a top-tier travel agent can make trips more straightforward and organized, remove the time burden from you or your colleagues, and ensure that you make good use of loyalty schemes and frequent flyer programs to reduce unnecessary travel costs.
What to Look For in a Great Travel Agent
Travel planners should possess fantastic communication abilities, ideally with an in-depth knowledge of your specified destinations, particularly for international travel, where advice about places to stay or where to host your guests can be invaluable. Effective communication and attention to detail ensure your schedules and plans are precise, carefully coordinated, and mapped out with clear information about connections, booking details, and the travel arrangements made on your behalf.
Companies browsing the network of more than 6,200 travel agents to hire on the Guru platform can also look for capabilities most relevant to the job or role they’d like a travel consultant to undertake, such as:
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Experience in types of travel, such as coordinating group business visits, arranging private charter flights, or preparing detailed expense reports and evidence of carbon footprint offset.
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Prior project testimonials with positive reviews and social ratings from past travel clients (all Guru's travel agent profiles show potential employers the freelancer's portfolio and feedback to offer insight into the service standards available)
Other skills often relevant to freelance travel agent commissions include familiarity with software tools to integrate your plans with your calendar and reporting systems, expertise in professional hospitality planning, and fluency in alternative languages throughout your intended destinations. A professional qualification in tourism, hospitality, travel, or business can be advantageous, but the capacity to negotiate and make detailed plans remains just as important when working with a travel agency.
For example, travel agents new to freelancing may have years of expertise representing an agency and have a high degree of competence that could potentially be more relevant than a newly qualified travel agent without on-the-ground experience. More junior travel agents can offer competitive rates, whereas highly skilled travel planning professionals will likely apply for customer jobs with a more generous budget.
Writing a Job Post For a Freelance Travel Agent
Guru makes it easy to connect with high-caliber travel agents and select the best freelance travel agency for the job. You can create a job post and share it free through the Guru portal, inviting suitably qualified candidates to submit a quotation. Alternatively, companies can browse travel agent profiles and assess the individual agent’s portfolio to decide who to contact directly for a price proposal.
If you choose to write a travel agent job post, our advice is to include as much information as possible to ensure prospective applicants can determine whether the job is a good match for their skills. You can include the following in your virtual travel agent job description:
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An overview of the work: Do you need an agent to manage all bookings and planning, or would you like them to provide data entry and reporting services to feed into your expenses and accounting system?
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Duration of the travel project: Some travel agents work on ad hoc or one-off projects. In contrast, others regularly work with the same business, developing familiarity with the client's priorities and expectations.
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Experience: If you need a travel agent with access to certain software packages, with a liaison within an airline or destination, or who has previously visited or lived in a location, this should be shown in the job post.
It is also useful to provide an indication of the business budget, noting whether you would like to hire a travel agent per hour, per day, or on an ongoing basis.
When hiring a travel agent, it's also important to ask interview questions that will help you understand if the travel agent is the right fit your your business needs. The travel agent should be flexible to your needs and support your travel plans.
Different Job Titles and Roles for a Freelance Travel Agent
One of the common issues for companies is that the perfect travel agent may not refer to their skills and services as a travel agent. This is a broad-scope term often used, but you may also wish to browse for the following job titles:
Corporate or Business Travel Agents
Travel agents specializing in business or corporate travel may incorporate these terms into their professional titles. This means they work on travel planning for companies according to their objectives, such as making group business travel as cost-effective as possible or accommodating hospitality requirements for visiting guests.
Retail Travel Planners or Bookers
These travel agents provide an end-to-end service, beginning with recommending locations and progressing through to custom planning and making reservations and bookings on behalf of the customer.
Remote or Distance Travel Agents
Some agents include ‘remote’ or ‘distance’ in their title to signify that they work independently and remotely, supporting any customer within potentially multiple countries with tailored travel planning.
Benefits of Hiring a Talented Independent Travel Agency
Freelance travel agents can make booking trips faster, easier, and more affordable, often with the potential to negotiate discounts or group booking reductions, while organizing every detail of your travel and providing comprehensive itineraries. Find the most highly qualified freelance travel agents on Guru today!