A couple of years ago in Jamaica, Wendy Quinn was reminded why she got into the travel business -- and why she wanted to start her own home-based travel agency.
"I stepped off the plane on a Sandals fam, and it inspired me," she said. "It got me excited about travel, but I realized that I wanted to handle the kind of travel that I want to do."
After years of unhappiness with office dynamics and unable to have the freedom to book the kind of travel she was passionate about, Quinn took the leap. She bought a Cruise Planners franchise about 18 months ago and opened Unique Escapes Travel, which specializes in Sandals, destination weddings and romance travel.
Wendy Quinn
Quinn, who has been a travel agent "off and on" for 25 years and is based in Tyngsboro, Mass., found it a relatively smooth transition. She started with clients who followed her, and then she building her business through local networking. Now she is looking at broadening her specialties.
She recently completed Wellness Tourism Worldwide's Wellness Travel Academy, a training program for travel professionals interested in making health and wellness tourism their specialty.
"I've begun to realize that traveling and wellness together are becoming more popular as people are more aware of their health and taking better care of themselves," she said. Quinn is especially interested in the academy's use of studies that show the health benefits of vacations, and how many Americans don't use their allotted vacation time. "It's important to educate people that vacations shouldn't be thought of as a luxury," she said, "and the numerous health benefits that people receive when they take their vacation time."
But she had some adjusting to do in the transition from employee at a brick-and-mortar agency to home-based. She said a local business group and her participation in a national organization, Business Networking International, helped her. Through networking with other business owners, she's met yoga teachers, acupuncturists and others who are interested in health and wellness travel and in connecting her to potential clients.
"BNI is a great organization, because it's all about referrals and building your business," Quinn said. "It brings together just one business owner from each profession in the community."
It also enabled Quinn to successfully manage one of the biggest issues that home-based agents face: isolation. One morning a week she drives to a local BNI meeting, where she gets together with other local business owners who discuss their issues in casual conversations that offer a lot of support, she said.
"Working from home was new for me," she said. "And having that weekly meeting when you go in and speak with other professionals and hear about their businesses has been helpful in going from working in an office, when you are around people all day, to working from home."