My career in travel began a year after I received my bachelor’s degree (in fashion design) from Florida State University. I started out with a 6-month unpaid “internship” at a very small travel agency in Fairfax County, Virginia. (They had managed the booking of a Caribbean cruise and my first tour of the UK, paid for with leftover school funds post-graduation.) During the internship period I had unlimited use of the firm’s Apollo GDS “blue box” computer terminal via which I could self-direct through myriad airline and train reservation, car rental, hotel booking, and other learning modules. I took client calls and meetings and almost literally taught myself how to be a travel agent. Eventually, I was offered a job. Apollo had a learning facility at a drive-able distance, and my manager allowed me to periodically take additional courses there. In my position as a travel agent, I was eligible for industry discounts and I used them to join familiarization (fam) trips to Anaheim, CA (the Halloween weekend River Phoenix died, as luck would have it), St. Maarten, and Ireland. I also took advantage of a discounted resort weekend in Jamaica and started making annual flights to Florida to visit friends. One year, my manager treated our office to an Amtrak ride up to Manhattan to window shop and watch the Rockettes’ “Christmas Spectacular” show at Radio City Music Hall. While on that trip, we took an elevator ride to the top of the World Trade Center. I was in that agent role for 3 and a half years at a pay rate that allowed me to meet a car payment and engage in a 20-something social life, but little else, and certainly could not afford to move out of my parents’ house–and I was receiving no insurance or 401k benefits.

The time came to move on, so I went to a larger firm that was building out a huge travel reservation center near Washington Dulles Airport, and I joined a team of corporate travel agents supporting two customers based in the San Francisco, CA area. The work paid more, and included health, if not savings benefits, and I was still eligible for travel agent discounts (took a solo trip to Oahu and Maui that year), but it was a very different work environment and I hated being tied to the phone and having my time on task clocked. The best part of the job was having great fellow agents, and a few of us single ladies were sent out to San Francisco for two weeks to work directly at the customer site. There was a blizzard in the DC metro area that week and on Thursday when the runways cleared, we were sent West in short order, since another snow storm was due. There was a US national holiday during that 2-week period, and we leveraged the 3-day weekend while there. To be honest, the group of us worked as little as possible and played as much as possible. We had one car rental to share amongst us and we put miles on it–Sonoma wine country, Tahoe in the snow, Monterrey in the sun. And the best part was, we could expense a good deal of it. Due to the level of stress in that role (it was common to take turns crying in the bathroom with coworkers), I lasted only 11 months before that job got the best of me, and I knew I needed to set my sights higher.

From there, I went to a chain travel management company, and was finally able to move out of my parents’ house. I had interviewed with two of the chain’s locations for a travel agent position. They both wanted me, but at the second office, something in my interview intrigued them and I was offered a non-advertised position as a junior account manager! Okay, customer service desk agent and for a 6-month trial or something like that–but if I couldn’t swing it, the deal was that they’d put me out on the reservation agent floor. I never wanted to be chained to the agent desk again, so you’d better believe I put my heart and soul into composing excellent apology letters to customers. Yes, I eventually did become a junior account manager, and then a full-fledged account manager, and in those roles I also had an opportunity to play tour guide with a group of customer travel arrangers to San Antonio, TX, as well as with my coworkers on an office trip to Denver, CO. A couple years later I transitioned to the company’s growing technical team, supporting their expanded offering of online travel booking capability, and fortuitously, it was a fairly safe role in which to be positioned during 9/11. I held several roles on that side of the house and ultimately remained with that firm through its multiple mergers for over 16 years. I loved working there. It was technology, so I had started to make money, but the reality is, it was still travel, and therefore not high paying. The company did, however, offer decent health insurance, 401k and industry benefits. Still, for the last 10 years that I was there, I also held a part time job at Kohls. Overall, during that period, I paid off my first car (kept for 9 years) and then traded it in for a new car (kept for 11 years), purchased a little townhouse, returned to school for a master’s degree (eBusiness), supported the lives of multiple adult cat adoptees in my home, and of course, I traveled. I did a lot of business travel around the United States, but I also took a lot of personal trips–to the UK (multiple times, with different friends), a motor coach tour in France with my twin sister, another coach tour in The Netherlands with a coworker friend, a long weekend in St John USVI, a “Love Boat”-style cruise down the Baja coast, and a graduation self-reward trip to Italy. I was very proud of how much I’d accomplished without going crazy into debt. I say this because although I was making a fair salary given my industry and position, I was living in a county with a high cost of living that is more suitable to dual-income households. It is all about the opportunities you seek, the choices you make, and the responsibilities you undertake.

As the saying goes, all good things must come to an end, and eventually working two jobs (in addition to holding multiple volunteer positions) took its toll and I realized I was no longer accomplishing my career goals. Thankfully, a unique travel role was suggested to me at a local technology company that focused on such things, and the rest is still history in the making (including that the “local” company is now part of a global firm). Transitioning out of the travel industry proper was very difficult for me. I was letting go of everything that had made me what I was, and I felt like a sell-out. I simultaneously felt worthy and unworthy of a technologist’s salary, though it far outweighed the travel industry benefits I’d left behind. During the years in my current position (I’m about to celebrate my 10-year work anniversary), my only business-related travel has been to Minnesota and Washington states for company events, but I’ve made personal air trips to Santa Fe, NM, Salem, MA, Charleston, SC, Cleveland, OH, and the UK (again)… took a very fancy European river cruise to celebrate a milestone birthday, and have made a variety of not too distant driving vacations. Like any avid traveler, I almost always have the next international trip’s planning in the works. There are so many places I haven’t been. And so many places I’m sure I’ll never go. But, I think, it’s safe to say that traveling is in my blood; I love to engage in it personally–and professionally, to help others do the same.