One thing I have learned being a Travel Agent – now referred to as Travel Advisor – for over 30 years is that sometimes people discard us. “Do Travel Agents even exist anymore?” The answer is YES! We do.
I took my first Caribbean cruise in 1979 and was hooked. You paid cash onboard in those days if you can imagine that. I visited Hawaii for the first time in 1981. You could actually see the beach of Waikiki when walking down Kalakaua Avenue. My next cruise was to the Mexican Riviera in 1983. The Love Boat TV series boosted the cruise industry – it was so glamorous!
I started my journey in the early 1990s as a part time Outside Agent, as we were referred to back then. I lived in a rural area and took all my training through the US Postal Service. No personal computers in those days. I graduated and started booking travel for clients. I had to drive 30 – 45 minutes each way to pick up airline tickets or travel documents from my Home Office.
When I entered the Travel Industry full time, I went to work in an office every day. People walked in and looked at all the brochures we had, racks of them. We hand wrote tickets for airlines and found their schedules in a giant book called the OAG. We had to call Cruise Lines and Tour Operators to book our clients. Then PCs came out and it started to get better. IBM created a way to print tickets through the ACP – Airline Control Program. It was great, if the machine didn’t jam.
In 1998, I entered the Corporate Travel World. By now you could book airlines, rental cars, and hotels on the PCs in the office. It seemed huge coming from the OAG and hand writing tickets. I booked travel for all the big Tech companies in the Phoenix area – Allied Signal (now Honeywell), Intel, IBM, GE. I learned my world geography from booking travel for our Road Warriors you traveled the world for business meetings. No such thing as Zoom or a Webinar then.
By 2012 Online Booking Tools had pretty much ended the Corporate Travel Call Center concept. The companies that had relied on Travel Agents now mandated their employees to book their own travel to save the company money. My last corporate job was booking for my companies Executives and almost 100% International Travel. But I could see that coming to a close as well. What to do?
I decided I wanted to stay in the Travel Industry, but how? A thing called a Host Agency was just starting to bloom then. What once was called an Outside Agent now became a larger part of a Brick and Mortar Travel Office. I researched and investigated a lot of them and narrowed it down to 5. I eliminated 4 after I reached out to chat with them and all they wanted was money up front before they would even talk to me. My 5th option and the one I went with had no trouble talking to me and answering my questions and really listening to what I wanted. Plus they had a connection to Sammy Hagar (in my mind) and it was an easy choose. Infinity Travel AZ, LLC was born in 2013.
At first it was all learning. Learning to sell Cruise Lines and Tour Operators. How to run a successful business. How to package vacations. SO much learning! I did this all in my free time as I still worked full time at my Corporate Travel job. But I was learning how to manage a business and take care of clients that weren’t just traveling for a face to face meeting. In 2015 I separated from the corporate world and never looked back.
