By Jennifer Morris

One of the best things about my profession is how it acts as an ice breaker in any social situation.  As soon as people learn that I’m a travel consultant, they start to talk.  About their holidays.  About their travel dreams.  About their bucket lists – it’s one of the best parts of my job: listening to those stories.  Travel is the definitive ice-breaker.

It wasn’t always easy though. Like any aircraft to ever take off from Runway 2 at Bulawayo Airport, my journey as a travel professional got off to a bumpy start.

Freshly home from my own twenty-something wanderings in the UK and in need of a job, I called a friend who suggested that I apply to a well-known retail travel brand because, in her words’ they’ll take anyone’.  Comforting…

I remember sitting in training a few weeks later, wondering what the hell I was doing.  It was the early 2000’s, and the Internet was officially a THING that everyone had access to, providing a portal for people to access goods and services directly from the suppliers including airlines, hotels and car hire companies.  Surely the days of being a broker between consumer and supplier were over?

I wondered out loud if we were all wasting our time training for a career which would be obsolete before the end of the decade, and was met with a shake of the head and an abrupt change of subject.  Not Comforting.

But travel was already in my blood and I was already hooked on the rush of putting together travel itineraries – even if it was for other people.  I persevered, completed my courses, qualified and joined a large retail agency selling off-the-shelf packages and cruises to honeymooners and retirees.

For a while it seemed as though my concerns regarding the viability of a career were unfounded, but gradually things started to change.  Fewer clients, harder sales, fewer airline incentives, leaner commission margins, stores closing, profits down… and then the global recession.  It became very clear to the travel industry, all at once, that a review of how we operated was needed if anyone was to survive.

Some players dug in their heels, decreased their margins even more and ploughed on in the hope that things would revert back to how they’d always been, but others chose to focus on what the new online-booking-savvy market needed NOW: someone to make sense of the chaos that was the result of every travel provider selling their wares online!  When a Google Search of London Hotels returns over 25 million results, you need someone who knows what they’re doing to narrow it down a little!  The idea of the Travel Consultant was born.

It thrilled me.  My talents have always lain in the acquisition of knowledge and the application of information. That’s a fancy way of saying I’m a nerd.  I left retail and embarked on a career as an Independent Travel Consultant which has shaped, inspired and fascinated me ever since.  One in which my personal passion for everything travel has full rein, and in which I can constantly seek to educate myself and others about the world and how to explore it.

For me, the difference between obsolete and essential comes down to three key factors: Expertise, Availability and Knowledge.

Good friends of mine recently surprised us with a visit from the UK.  They almost didn’t though, because the online booking portal Good Friend used to secure her flights didn’t tell her about the need for unabridged birth certificates when entering or leaving South Africa.  A rather tense situation, a frantic taxi ride home and back again and a mad-dash for the boarding gate with three children in tow wasn’t quite the start to her holiday that she’d envisioned, and it all could have been avoided with the application of Knowledge.

Not long before that, a corporate client of mine received word late on a Saturday night that his daughter had been hijacked in Cape Town.  It was after midnight, but he called me and within the hour I had him on the first morning flight out to her.  Availability and 24/7 access to systems is crucial, and something I feel very strongly about.  Invariably, if someone goes wrong on a trip, it goes wrong Out of Office Hours.

I have countless other examples of how travel consultants who care have made themselves essential to their clients, but never was the weighty responsibility of that role more apparent to me than on the weekend of 25th April 2015.

I was out shopping when the husband of one of my oldest clients called and said: Jen, turn on Sky News.  I did, and stared in horror at the devastation of Kathmandu following a 7.8 magnitude quake which shattered the city and trapped 13 South African travelers in their hotel.  My travelers.  A group of ladies from Cape Town visiting Nepal as part of a fertility programme – one I’ve long been affiliated with.

There’s no time to go into the details of the next three days, or to explain how we did it, but by Tuesday afternoon, all 13 were safe and sound in a hotel in Bangkok, far away from the carnage that nearly claimed their lives.  We get together on occasion to celebrate that survival and retell our stories – a life changing event of all of them, and a career-affirming one for me.  When it mattered, my expertise was essential, not obsolete, and I’m glad I was there.

At the very least, it makes a helluva good story for breaking the ice.