The series
Guides
7 guides to the things the directory’s figures cannot say on their own: what the arrangements mean, what the money looks like, what protects whose money, and which questions to take into a sales call.
They are written from the same dataset as the rest of the site. Where a guide quotes a figure it is read live from the comparison table, so a correction to a company’s record changes the guide too. Nobody pays to appear.
Start here
- How to become a travel agent from home in the UK The routes in, what a host agency actually does for you, what the first year tends to look like, and the regulation you need to understand before you sell anything.
- How much do home-based travel agents earn in the UK? Employee salary averages and recruitment claims measure different things. Here is the commission arithmetic that sits underneath both, worked through with real splits from the directory.
- ABTA, ATOL and trust accounts explained Which protection covers whose money, why an ATOL held by your suppliers is not the same as one held by your host, and what any of it means for you as the agent.
- Host agency, franchise or consortium: what the words mean Three arrangements, three sets of vocabulary, and one British term — homeworking — that covers most of them. A plain guide to which is which.
- How to choose a host agency A checklist for the decision, and the questions worth asking on the sales call — including the few that rarely come up unless you raise them.
- Multi-level recruitment in travel, explained What multi-level recruitment is, where it appears in UK travel, and how to tell recruitment structure apart from the question of whether a company is a legitimate travel business.
- Host agency fees explained Joining fees, monthlies, per-booking charges and turnover cuts — and what four real companies in the directory would cost you across a first year.
Figures quoted in the guides were last reviewed on 2026-09-22. Nothing here is financial, legal or business advice. See the methodology note for where the data comes from, or the directory for the 42 company profiles.