With post-Covid demand for travel advisors at a historic high, and as longtime agents look to retire from what is an increasingly busy job, an influx of new blood is filling agency ranks. 

A survey by American Marketing Group found that 69% of Travelsavers and Network of Entrepreneurs Selling Travel (NEST) agencies plan to or may hire advisors in the coming year, and two-thirds of those agencies have more than one spot to fill. The Travel Institute reports that enrollment in its introductory advisor training course, TripKit, was up 20% in the first quarter of the year compared with 2023, already a busy year during which the institute enrolled double the number of students it normally does.

As welcome as this wave of newbies is, it also sparks concern: How quickly can they be onboarded and trained? Could a rash of inexperienced and unknowledgeable advisors turn the tide of consumer sentiment away from agencies? 

To document this unprecedented time, Travel Weekly found 10 advisors who entered the industry in the past year, starting in April 2023. They were identified with the help of four industry groups: ASTA, the Travel Institute, Host Agency Reviews and FindaHostTravelAgency.com. 

Travel Weekly will provide updates on their progress in one, three and five years’ time.

In this first installment, we invite readers to get to know this group — their previous careers, their motivations to become advisors and their business goals.

MARRYING MEDICINE AND TRAVEL

Alissa Ashley-High, of Shrewsbury, Mass., has spent her career in healthcare. A nurse with a master’s degree in healthcare administration, she is the administrator for a busy orthopedic surgical practice and is married to a physician. 

“We were kind of evaluating our longevity in medicine,” Ashley-High said. “It’s a hard career, especially since Covid.”

She also recently started cruising with her wife and two young children and really enjoyed it. With a lifelong philosophy of “work hard, travel harder,” she said, she decided to embark on a career as a travel advisor.

“I want to help people to make sure they’re getting the best deal,” she said. “Because I don’t know about anyone else, but if I save a bunch of money on a trip, I book another trip.”

Ashley-High is in the midst of the Travel Institute’s TripKit program and hopes to take her Travel Agent Proficiency (TAP) test this summer. When her children are older, she envisions tying together travel and concierge medicine.

A DESIRE TO HELP

After a 24-year career as a victim services coordinator with the district attorney’s office in Grayson County, Texas, Tara Brown retired and moved to Frisco, near Dallas. In 2016, she started walking dogs, which turned into a full-fledged business. But by 2022, all of the walking took its toll, necessitating a knee replacement.

As she thought about her next move, travel advising looked appealing. Likely, she said, because of her work as a victim services coordinator: She enjoys helping people, and she’s very detail-oriented.

Last year, Brown went to a local travel show and connected with Steve Phillips, who heads American Marketing Group’s KORE travel advisor training program. She finished his training and mentorship program and last October started working as an advisor with Lisell Travel.

Brown initially focused only on ocean cruising and all-inclusive vacations, but she plans to add river cruising and luxury international travel. 

Continued education is also on tap, and she may start charging service fees.

“I understand the importance of building relationships and securing clients, especially when starting out, but it’s kind of a Catch-22 situation, because I want to accommodate them but not impose a planning fee,” she said. “But I also want to consider the value of my time and expertise.”

A CONSULTANT ADVISES

After starting her career in retail with brands like Gap and Pacific Sunwear, Shannon Kruse, of Los Alamitos, Calif., shifted to business consulting about 10 years ago. Last August, she shifted again and joined Gifted Travel Network to try her hand at travel consulting.

Gifted attracted her because of its yearlong Travel MBA training program. Travel in general appealed to her because of her longtime love of it, she said, starting with her Semester at Sea experience while in college.

While Kruse is selling leisure travel to friends and family now, she’s moving toward corporate incentive travel for smaller companies, an area where she sees a need for a professional travel advisor.

“I know that in so many companies, the wrong person is planning the travel, and they’re just calling the hotel with zero knowledge of how to book, how to build a contract and what type of incentives, how they can negotiate,” she said. “I’m really excited to lean into the corporate side of incentive travel.”

SUPERVISOR TO SELLER

After more than two decades at a large, national travel agency, Mark Lee, of St. Petersburg, Fla., decided he was tired of the corporate world.

He started at the agency in 1997 booking domestic hotel reservations, car rentals and tours, but quickly moved into mostly supervisory roles. Recently, though, he decided he wanted to go back to his roots.

He retired and bought a Cruise Planners franchise this year and is becoming a travel advisor.

“I just decided, you know what, I’ve had too much of this corporate world,” Lee said, adding that since buying the franchise, “it’s been a whirlwind.” 

He’s booked a few cabins on Royal Caribbean and hopes to ramp up sales after completing training with Cruise Planners. He plans to focus on European river cruises and tours, and might dabble in LGBTQ+ travel (he plays with an LGBTQ+ softball group in Tampa and has a large pool of potential clients).

He was drawn to Cruise Planners on the recommendations of friends in the industry: “They said, ‘You don’t even need to go anywhere else, Cruise Planners has got everything you need.’”

GUIDING EMPTY-NESTERS, HONEYMOONERS

Judi Lombardi, of Malden, Mass., has always loved travel. After college, she became a guide with Collette, first on itineraries to Atlantic City then in the Southwest and on the West Coast. After four years, she went back to school and had a 30-year career in speech language pathology and education.

Over the years, she said, she thought about travel advising as a career, but life got in the way. Finally, last year, she took the leap. And while her biggest fear was how to find leads, that turned out not to be a problem.

“I created many circles, with my kids’ sports teams, with [parent-teacher groups], with all that kind of fun stuff,” Lombardi said. 

Her clients now fall into two buckets: empty-nester parents and their kids. “Every single thing I have is either a honeymoon or it’s 55- to 60-year-old people celebrating.”

Small groups are her specialty, and she books lots of FIT to Europe. Lombardi’s ultimate plan, though, is to run one or two hosted trips each year, bridging her experience as a tour guide and a teacher. She has a group going on a cruise in Greece and Croatia next year and an Africa trip planned for 2026.

CRUISING ‘OBSESSION’ TURNED CAREER

Travel planning has always been a favorite pastime for Stacey Love, of St. Cloud, Fla. And she’s long seen the value in travel advisors: She would plan vacations down to the room number but ask her advisor to book it.

A physical therapist by trade, Love broke her back in a car accident several years ago.

“It kind of left me not knowing what to do,” she said. “I couldn’t work, so I was focused on recovery. I became a stay-at-home mom and missed having a purpose outside of the home.”

When her son started kindergarten, she knew it was time to make a move. After developing an “absolute obsession” with cruising, Love joined the Moms at Sea Facebook page, run by Moms at Sea Travel.

She joined the agency in September and completed a number of trainings. In February she became part of the core team that fields leads. In addition to a number of cruise lines, which are the agency’s bread and butter, Love has started booking all-inclusives and groups. She hopes to break into family river cruising and specialize in Europe; she’s arranging a number of personal trips in the coming year to help with those goals.

A CAREER THAT SPARKS JOY

The pandemic was a difficult time for many. Pittsburgh’s Steve Lubinski counts himself among them. 

“Like a lot of people, after the pandemic, I just got to a place where I was pretty unhappy, having a lot of anxiety,” he said. 

With 16 years of accounting under his belt, Lubinski wanted to make a change. A big Disney fan, one of his escapes was watching Disney vacation-planning videos online. 

“It became clear, after kicking around a couple of different ideas, that I wanted to start my own travel agency or be in that space focusing on Disney vacations,” he said.

Lubinski completed TripKit and formed an LLC in January. He is working on getting his agency out there with a Facebook page and getting a website up and running. Content creation in the form of a podcast or YouTube channel is also on his radar.

And while Disney and Universal are his wheelhouse, he’s interested in learning about — and selling — all kinds of family travel.

FROM BEDS AND BEER TO TRAVEL

“Entrepreneurial” is the way Brenda Pearson, of Wabasha, Minn., describes herself. She had to be, she said, as she was raising her son on her own in South Florida. She put herself through college and massage school.

Every year, she would renew her massage license on a cruise ship  and ended up falling in love with ocean cruising.

Once her son grew up, Pearson moved back to Minnesota to care for family. She bought the Turning Waters Bed, Breakfast and Adventure, and runs a brewery, Hoppy Girl Brewing, there.

Last year, eight years after launching the B&B, she went on a Viking river cruise. She loved it.

“I came home and I immediately started YouTubing how to become a travel advisor,” she said, calling it her “retirement job.”

She started as an advisor last May, with much of her clientele made up of her B&B customers. Her initial focus is on river and ocean cruising, but she’s been studying various destinations, especially in Europe, and would also like to move into the wellness space.

THE IMPORTANCE OF DIVERSITY

A career marketer, Anthony Roberts Jr., of Louisville, Ky., worked for corporate brands including Nascar, Planet Fitness and KFC. He’s always been a traveler and a foodie.

Before the pandemic, a friend asked for his help planning a trip. He said yes. It was the start of a concierge-style business where he acted as his clients’ on-call assistant for travel. But he realized it wasn’t sustainable: There are only so many people one person has the bandwidth to assist.

After Roberts was laid off following an acquisition, he took time to research the travel industry. He joined Nexion Travel Group last year.

Roberts said he wants to increase diversity in the industry and to serve communities of color. 

“All segments travel, all people do, no matter your race, your creed, your religion, sexual orientation,” he said.

Roberts, a frequent solo traveler, has been selling a lot to individual travelers. He’s focused solely on adult travel, including all-inclusives, cruises and leading group experiences.

He plans to bring on some agents as well as start offering internships for members of minority groups in college.

SOCIAL CLUB TAKES OFF

When Scott Walker moved to Fort Lauderdale last June, he didn’t have friends in the area. He started a group on Facebook called HH Social Club for people to get together for happy hour.

The club took off. Less than a year in, the main group has 6,500 members, and satellite groups have several hundred. Club members, who mostly live in or around Fort Lauderdale, meet regularly for happy hours, bus trips and other events and activities. 

“When Covid hit, everyone sort of forgot how to go out,” Walker said, adding that it can be hard for adults to make new friends.

When members started talking about travel, a lightbulb went off in Walker’s head. The club could be a springboard for group trips. He got in touch with TravelFun owner Shelby Frenette, who helped him put together a group to Greece. It sold out in a week.

Walker, who affiliated with TravelFun in January, plans to run four international groups each year, interspersed with some domestic trips. He said he believes club members have an appetite for travel and will fill seats. “Everyone feels like family, and everyone trusts me.”

This report was updated on June 17, 2024.