This is a great question! Allow us to explain the reason why we chose to work from home rather than a retail office.
Our involvement in travel goes back to 2001 when we officially became established in the travel industry, and as we move forward to 2006, we both built our careers working for several well-established Corporate and Vacation Retail companies located in Winnipeg and Vancouver as well.
It was around late 2006 when we felt that we outgrew the Retail and Corporate travel environment, and with our experience and passion in Destination Weddings and Specialty Group Vacations, it was time for us to grow our passion by becoming independent travel professionals and run our own business.
We chose to partner with an established travel company (Travel Professionals International - 2007 -2018) who gave us the option to run our specialty travel business from a home office. In 2018 we switched over to another travel host company called (The Travel Agent Next Door), and this was extremely important to us, because as we established our travel company on the model of convenience and having complete flexibility. With no set hours or being subjected to a restricted retail environment, gave us the opportunity to provide our clients with the most flexible and convenient customer service and meeting environment.
Also working from our home travel office gives us the opportunity to keep our businesses expenses down, allowing for us to pass those additional savings on to our valued clients through extra travel and vacation incentives and perks.
However, by saying all this, we are always open to considering going Retail in the future, and if the demand is big enough, we would definitely look at that as an option. But, for now, we are happy with running our travel company as a home-based business, and our clients love the flexibility and convenience as well.