Ten years ago this month we launched this magazine designed for professional home-based travel agents. At the time, we really had done very little research that would have predicted its success. Instead, we had a gut feeling, based on long experience in the travel industry, that a publication designed to help agents working from home would be embraced by them and by the suppliers they sold.

Home-based travel agents have always existed, of course. Some were known as referral agents who funneled clients to larger agencies. Others were part-timers, often derided as kitchen-table agents, who tried to sell travel as a side business. They loved selling travel to their customers and experiencing travel for themselves.

As the number of home-based agents grew in the 1990s, however, dedicated groups and associations sprung up to cater to their needs, such as the Outside Sales Support Network (OSSN) and the National Association of Commissioned Travel Agents (NACTA). And as their individual sales increased, suppliers took notice.

Many dedicated host travel agencies also were launched that supplied back-office systems, support, marketing, technology and training for increasingly larger numbers of home-based agents. Even before the dawn of the Internet, such agencies as Travel Experts offered a rent-a-desk solution for independent agents.

Other agencies, like Cruise Planners and similar models, catered to the growing base of home-based cruise sellers. And agencies like Nexion offered technical and reservations support for small agencies and independent agents.

But almost no one could have predicted the extreme growth of the home-based agent market or the development of the large host agencies as major players in the distribution system. Indeed, that growth has taken off in the past decade.

I began to realize just how quickly the home-based agent market was growing, back in 2003, when I was out doing sales calls with my ad team at my previous publication. I met with Kirk Lanterman, then chairman of Holland America Line, who told me his biggest problem, at the time, was “finding all those home-based agents” who booked his cruises.

A few years before that, I remember moderating a travel agent tradeshow panel and asking the audience how many worked from home. When over half raised their hands, I almost ran for the doors: I didn’t think the cruise suppliers on my panel had any interest in reaching the home-based agent market. Now here was Kirk Lanterman, just a few years later, telling me that reaching home-based agents was one of his greatest challenges.

I went back to the powers that be at my old magazine and let them know we might not be reaching the right audience. Until then our message had been that our subscribers were owners and managers for every ARC, IATA and CLIA agency in the country. Now here was a whole new group of frontline salespeople (home-based agents) whom we were clearly not reaching.

Later in September 2003 I left my old magazine and, after a few months, reconnected with Mark Murphy, who had been publisher of that magazine, but who had left to form his own company, ModernAgent.com, the predecessor to travAlliancemedia. Mark brought me on board to launch TravelPulse.com, which has now grown to be the most widely read travel agent-focused website in the country.

In the spring of 2004, Mark asked me whether I thought a magazine focused on home-based travel agents would meet the needs of a new readership base. Remembering my conversation with Kirk Lanterman, as well as my own observations that home-based agents now seemed to be in the majority at many of the travel agent conferences I had been attending, I agreed with Mark that it was a marvelous idea and one whose time had come.

We began planning that summer for the September 2004 launch of Agent@Home, a magazine designed to meet the needs of home-based travel professionals. It was never designed to be a “news” publication, but one that would help these professionals sell and market better, get the latest in technology and discover ways to run their business more profitably, as well as give them great product and destination information.

Even before we launched our new magazine, one of our competitors decided to start its own home-based agent publication. Another competitor did the same a few months after we launched. And yet a third competitor published a column in advance of our launch date saying home-based agents were never going to be a significant force in the market and were “small potatoes.”

The first two publications dropped their home-based editions within a year, and let’s just say that the competitor who published the pessimistic column has had to rethink its views and play catchup in a home-based agent market that we had already recognized was one that travel suppliers valued highly. We also found that home-based agents were eager and enthusiastic to get a publication that was specifically designed for them. I never have seen such a positive reaction to a new travel trade publication in all my years in the business.

Of course, when people ask, I always say we launched this publication on a hunch, a gut feeling that what we had seen and experienced in the travel agent marketplace was a harbinger for a surge in the number of home-based travel professionals.

Then in January 2005, imagine our surprise when Credit Suisse First Boston, not known as an institution to even recognize travel agents period, published a report called “Home Bookin’” that said the number of home-based agents were growing at a faster pace, 5-8 percent per year, than any other part of the distribution system, including online travel.

Needless to say, this new research only confirmed our belief that a great magazine for home-based travel agents was a much-needed and necessary addition to the market. Indeed, over the past 10 years the number of home-based agents has grown to represent nearly half, and by some accounts more than half, of all working travel agents today.

Technology has helped create more home-based and mobile workplaces for many professions. For home-based agents the Internet and the growth of mobile computing have provided perfect solutions to a profession that really does not need a physical office location to be successful. Home-based agents have successfully eliminated overhead, set their own work hours, sold what they want and owned their own businesses.

Nevertheless it’s still a very challenging profession. It’s very difficult to make money, especially quickly, in this business, which is why we continue to believe a magazine like Agent@Home is so essential. Our goal is to help independent travel entrepreneurs select and adapt their business models so they can make money and also experience a rewarding profession.

Indeed, there are so many models of success in the home-based agent market that it’s difficult to say that any one form works better than the next. There are destination specialists, family travel specialists, honeymoon and romance specialists, cruise specialists, river cruise specialists, one-product specialists and many, many more.

With the growth of the home-based agent market has come another phenomenon: the rise of the host travel agency. As I mentioned above, hosts have long existed in the business, though often they were traditional agencies with affiliated outside agents.

What changed over the past decade has been the rise of the pure host, meaning agencies that serve to support independent contractors and have no employed agents in their offices. What’s also changed is the number of different host models, all of them very successful. There’s even an association of host agencies called PATH (Professional Association of Travel Hosts), which seeks to develop best practices and better understand the challenges faced by host agencies.

These days some of the most successful travel agencies in the country are hosts. They range from Avoya Travel, which evolved from a very traditional travel agency into a host that has been highly successful at selling cruises through a lead-generation system, to aforementioned Nexion, which began as a technology solution for independent and small agencies and has grown into one of the largest hosts in the country. Travel Experts, for its part, is not{now?} one of Virtuoso’s top-selling travel agencies.

Many hosts that began by supporting independent cruise-sellers have branched into other areas of travel, like Cruise Planners, Cruises Inc. and Avoya, among others. Other hosts like Travel Quest, Travel Planners International, Oasis and Outside Agents have all grown extensively by following a model based on back-office support, training, marketing assistance and technology. Quite literally there is a host to fit almost any independent home-based agent business model.

Throughout the evolution of the home-based agent market, we at Agent@Home magazine have done our best to provide information at the forefront of the travel agency profession. We explore themes that are critical to the development of home-based agents, such as Selling Cruises, Developing a Business Plan, Selling Tours, Choosing the Right Host, Selling Hotels & Resorts, Selling Groups, Selling Vacation Packages, Family Travel, Training & Education, Selling Strategies, Technology and Market Outlook.

We have featured a unique roster of regular columnists who offer valuable advice to home-based agents each month. We also feature industry sections dedicated to cruises, hotels and resorts, tours and packages, host agencies, consortia and how to sell specific destinations.

We are already seeing changes in the demographics of home-based agents. When we began, most home-based agents came from traditional travel agencies. Perhaps their agency had merged or shut its doors, but the agents wanted to continue to use their expertise selling travel. What’s happened more recently is a slew of new entrants into the home-based market, some seeking a second career in a profession they want to fully embrace because they love travel.

Still others are younger people who have realized just how great being a travel agent can be: They work for themselves, sell a product everyone likes to buy, and get to travel in a style that most people do not.

In the next few months you’ll see us evolve even further as we work to meet the needs of our home-based agent readers. We are constantly talking to our readers to make sure we are delivering the information they need in order to do their jobs even better. For us, Agent@Home has become more than a magazine—it is instead resource for what continues to be an essential and continually growing part of the distribution system. We look forward to serving our home-based agent readers for the next decade and beyond!