Advantage Travel Centres Limited (trading as Advantage Travel Partnership) has today announced their year-end financial results for 2021/22.

• As a result of the increase in trading part way through the year, the Partnership’s transactional turnover saw a significant increase to £88,007,276 (2021: £12,679,725).
• The Partnership’s statutory turnover increased to £21,477,459 (2021: £5,656,290).
• Total global sales turnover across the membership grew to £12.5bn, of this £4.5bn represented sales turnover from UK members (£3bn from business travel and £1.5bn leisure).
• The Partnership returned to profit and reported a net profit before tax for the year of £619,815 (2021: loss before tax of £327,229) from continuing operations and net assets at year-end of £5,842,283 (2021: £5,198,916).

The partnership cites that this strong set of financial results have been driven by a strategy focused on building back the business and its balance sheet following two years of pandemic impact and making further investments into its core membership services and its people.

Commenting on the results, Advantage Travel Partnership’s Chairman Steven Esom said: “Following the challenges of a global pandemic, this was a year when worldwide governments started to remove travel restrictions, almost immediately triggering a much-anticipated pent-up demand for travel. Whilst this was positive news for the sector, it brought with it further challenges as the industry grappled with the reopening of international travel.

“Against this backdrop our members weathered this storm well by managing their customers’ travel plans as best they could to help minimise disruption and be on hand to guide and support them. This has held them in good stead going forward, as research shows that more and more consumers and corporate travellers look to book with travel professionals and experts in what is becoming an increasingly complex world to navigate when travelling.

“Across our Partnership, the size of our membership base has continued to grow, and we welcomed

a further 137 new branches to the network. 36 of BTN Europe's Top 50 TMCs are now included in the Partnership’s UK membership and we are recognised as the second largest Travel Management Company (TMC) network in Europe. In total, we grew the Advantage Global Network to 96 members, retaining our presence in 83 countries worldwide.

“As always, we remain enormously grateful for the support and continued commitment of our members. Their tenacity in what was another demanding year for the industry was once again demonstrated and their collective success at mitigating the impact of a further challenging trading period is reflected in the strong financial results reported by the group.

“As the world continues to recover from the pandemic, global pressures remain in the form of high inflation, rising interest rates, cost of living pressures and the ongoing conflict in Ukraine. In response, the Partnership will continue to implement short-term strategic priorities, whilst remaining agile to diversify with liquidity remaining positive.”

Julia Lo Bue-Said, CEO, Advantage Travel Partnership, added: “To further strengthen the organisation’s build back from the pandemic we invested in a robust structure to support our ambitious growth agenda and made a number of promotions and key appointments to the senior leadership team during the year, including the appointment of Guy Snelgar to the newly created position of Global Business Travel Director and Xian Mayes to the position of Chief of People, who will be instrumental in delivering the prerequisite talent, culture and wellbeing requirements of what we consider to be our greatest asset.

“Driven by Chief Commercial Officer Kelly Cookes, working alongside Paul Nunn, our Chief Operating Officer and regulatory expert, the Partnership’s unique structure enables us to continue leveraging our buying scale across all our operating models, to maximise the best return for our members.

“During the year, Advantage also continued to raise its profile across business, government and the media, as well as creating a public affairs and lobbying arm to champion the UK Outbound Travel sector.  In doing so, Advantage has maintained its position as the leading voice for outbound travel with government and policymakers and created greater visibility and recognition for all travel agents operating in the UK Outbound Travel sector.

“To ensure we continue to receive input into key strategic projects and initiatives across the Partnership, we also continued to strengthen our Member Steering Groups, and these are now firmly established and providing us with valuable insight.  These working groups, on which we have members representing all key areas of our business, mean we remain laser-focused on what is important to members and drives progress in areas that deliver greater value for their businesses.

 “The measures we have taken in the last 12 months put us in a much stronger position going forward.  The newly appointed leadership future-proofs the business for the long-term and allows us to remain focused on meeting the day-to-day needs of our members, whilst driving the strategy for the longer-term agenda, driving forward on our four strategic pillars; footprint expansion, product and portfolio capitalisation; digital transformation and operational excellence as well as investing in our people and culture.

“My heartfelt thanks go to my team at Advantage who have once again worked over and above in what has been another challenging year. Their support and commitment to the business and each other shows no bounds and, as always, I am eternally grateful for all they do.”