If you’re new here – hi!
A quick little back story about what brought me from events into the travel world in the first place ✈️
I’ve been an event planner my entire career – I went to school for it, graduated and worked my way up the coveted “corporate ladder” and was truly, living my best 20-something life traveling the world. I worked in the corporate finance space creating the most gorgeous experiences for our attendees…the kind you would only dream of when you thought about getting into the event space.
Think embroidered pillow cases and turning a trade show floor into an out door Coachella themed event where each exhibitor had a “booth” that was a different activation, multiple stages, IG worthy food & yes, a real, functioning ferris wheel.
I found passion and excitement in creating exceptional moments at every single touch point of the event – it kinda became my thing and I was SO proud of it 💁♀️
But there was one part of the event experience I struggled, for years, to find the right partner to flawlessly execute in the way our attendees had come to expect…travel.
To me, your attendee experience starts the moment they land on your event page, and doesn’t finish until the moment they step foot back in their front door – so how come one of the most high stress parts of the entire experience didn’t seem to be taken seriously. It irked me!
So, back in 2015 (yes, I am dating myself) I downloaded the TICO study guide and decided to just do it myself because that way I could control the experience and make every part of the event exceptional and I would really lean into the control freak part of me that wanted to control every part of the experience.
Turns out, running events nationally for 3 large brands, trying to navigate the chaos of a toxic work culture and have some sort of personal life meant that my dreams of becoming a licensed travel advisor were put on the back burner.
Fast forward 5 years to March 2020…yes, THE March 2020 you’re thinking about.
Life looked a lot different…clearly
I had taken the leap of faith and was 9 months into owning my dream event planning business when the world shut down and like every other millennial during lockdown, I downloaded Tik Tok.
I veryyyy quickly realized I had 2 decisions to make – jump on the dance trends, or spend my time being productive in building the back end of my business. So I downloaded the TICO study guide, and spent a year just trying to understand the new travel industry that I was joining.
A year later I found a host agency that would be a good fit for me to have a few of my team members join so we could finally live out our dreams of helping our event clients with their travel in a way that we were obsessed with.
What happened next I truly could have never imagined…
As we started sharing our new venture on social media, our DMs were FLOODED with people asking to join our team and get support in building their travel businesses. We were shocked that this little idea of wanting to support our own clients was quickly becoming a team that was growing, hitting millions of dollars a year in sales and truly, changing the narrative for what was possible in the travel space.
Naturally – we out grew our host. We pushed for change that wasn’t coming, we asked for support that wasn’t given and we were restricted by the the choices made by someone else, for our business. Despite many conversations, years of patience and trying to make it work – we decided we needed to find a better fit.
As any business owner would do, we set out to find out what our next opportunity would look like. Was it a new host to join, or did we take the leap of faith and go independent and become our own host agency.
After months of planning, building, dreaming & countless calls with our legal team – we decided to go for it.
To build the host agency we couldn’t find, to chase after our dreams with no one holding us back and to create a business that made it easy for advisors to succeed and not subscribe to the narrative that we were so frustrated by in the travel space.
Our vision is simple: to create an environment for our advisors to build businesses that fuel their lives, not one that breeds competition. We provide our advisors all the resources, support, community and growth strategies that they need to be successful so they can focus on what they do best – sell travel and curate exceptional trips for their clients, while we take care of all the back end.
We’re not even 10 months into being our own host agency, we’ve already doubled our team and our sales & we truly feel like we’re just getting started.
