When we launched Agent@Home in 2004, some people thought we were crazy. Who, in their right mind, would launch a trade magazine in a space where other trade magazines were cutting way back or going out of business? But we had an inside track: we saw the amazing growth in the home-based agency channel because we understood how technology was transforming the market.

Four months after launching Agent@Home in September 2004, Credit Suisse First Boston came out with an in-depth report, “Home Bookin’: A White Paper on the Emergence of the Home-Based Agency Channel,” which stated that the home-based agency channel accounted for 15 to 20 percent of the market, and was expected to grow 300 percent or more in the years ahead.

The aim of the report was to highlight the home-based market’s impact on publicly traded travel companies and how they might adapt to engage this audience. We weren’t surprised by these findings, since we came to this conclusion more than twelve months earlier, as we marched toward the first issue of Agent@Home. Now we’re marching forward again.

In January of 2019, travAlliancemedia will once again take the lead in engaging the travel agency market with relevant content and tools to build their business, and in a significantly expanded way. Beginning with our first issue in January, the Agent@Home brand will be broadened to encompass the content that has been seen in Vacation Agent magazine since 2005.

With a frequency of twenty-four issues a year, Agent@Home will engage the 70 percent of agents who work from home today—a number that’s nearly 500 percent higher than when we initially launched the magazine in 2004.

That 70 percent number isn’t some creation of our own. It’s been a trend for the past two decades, and one that has been recognized increasingly by third-party research results, including The Travel Institute’s most recent study.

In December 2017, it conducted research on more than 2,000 of its agent members. The results showed that 62 percent of all agents are independent contractors, while 22 percent of all storefront agents work from home.

These findings mirror our own, as we continue to provide the only platform that reaches and engages home-based travel agents with relevant content. As for the agent community in general, our reach to more than 96,000 agents via TravelPulse.com continues to lead the digital space by engaging virtually all agents across the US and Canada.