Are you watching the Olympics from Tokyo this past week? It’s inspiring, isn’t it?
The Canadian women are rocking it – and we have the most decorated Canadian Olympian just getting her 7th medal in the pool last night. Go, Penny Oleksiak https://www.cbc.ca/sports/olympics/summer/aquatics/swimming/penny-oleksiak-womens-medley-relay-olympics-swimming-day-9-heroux-1.6125843
It’s so amazing to watch the years of training, and dedication, get called into play for a moment in time. To watch and learn about the stories about these athletes from around the globe- from Simone Biles to Maggie MacNeil to Kaylee McKeown – all of those countless hours, trying to do their personal best, for very little (or no) money. All of that hard work – all for the love of what they do.
Sounds vaguely familiar to those of us in the travel world – at least these past 17-18 months.
Ok, I didn’t get up at 4 am, and drag my lazy self to a cold pool, again and again, or pushed my body to do maniacal twists for floor exercises or on the balance beam in gymnastics. And I’m no Maude Cherron (holy weightlifting – https://vancouversun.com/sports/olympics/canadas-maude-charron-wins-olympic-gold-in-weightlifting.) But I certainly know about all of the Herculean efforts us travel advisors have had to undertake for clients this past year. Maybe it’s the world coming together now. Maybe it’s the words from my executive team during our weekly zoom calls that each client’s holiday now takes at least 3x the amount of work. All of this during a year of tumult and upset, and having our beloved travel industry absolutely devastated. But our love of travel, and those of us in the travel world, keeps us going. And it certainly feels like Olympian efforts for travel advisors.
One of my travel colleagues said recently that as travel advisors, it’s like we’re suffering a little from PTSD after the past 17 months of cancelling and rebooking, and cancelling again. Maybe we have fallen off the balance beam one too many times. But we still keep getting back up.
It’s almost as if all of our years of training and expertise has been called into this moment of time, where us travel advisors are being called upon to do our personal best. As I’d said to a client this week, any travel advisor who is still working in the field after these past 17 months is the absolute best at what they do.
One thing we all know for sure is that our roles as a travel advisors, as we emerge from CoVid, has never been more complex.
Here’s a day’s tasks as I’d managed a client’s 3rd time re-booked France river cruise. These are just some of the things I was involved in this week (and this is typical of every client’s vacation I’m working on right now – I just typed this one up as I was creating a ‘check list’). Here’s an overview of what I’ve been doing::