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TPN was conceived by a group of travel agents while cruising on the Azamara Journey in South America. The consensus of the group was that someone needed to find a way to differentiate professional travel agents from all others that claim to be agents but only dabble, or worse, are affiliated with card mills, network marketers, affiliate marketing programs and other schemes that try to present their “members” as travel agents, when they are not.

The group expressed that the effort needed to be run by travel professionals rather than any other organization that would profit from the solicitation and acquisition of memberships or other continuing revenues from professional agents. The group was adamant that there should only be a one-time fee for verification of an agent's qualifications and that every person that qualifies meet a minimum standard combining gross sales, education, experience and ethics. Most important was the requirement that the organization be completely decentralized so that there be no employees or overhead whatsoever. The only beneficiary would be the company assigned to process the testing and qualifications on behalf of the network. This company would have no motivation to either award or deny potential candidates and that there would be no contact by the organization other than that of processing applications.

It was further deemed important that there be three separate categories of professional agents based on their gross sales and overall immersion in the travel industry. Factors to determine the immersion would be industry wide and not focused on any one organization’s training or certification, but rather all aspects of industry training, experience and tenure. It was also believed that the members should drive the organization through evolving consensus and taking action as a group through the use of technology.

While TPN offers three separate designations, all professional designees will display a common logo and identity so as not to compare one professional business model from another. Based on these ideas, the Travel Professionals Network was born in the spring of 2008.