Inspired at Conference: My New Travel Blog Begins
What a week on Star Princess! I'm writing this on the plane home from our 2025 CruiseOne/Dream Vacations National Conference, and to be quite honest, I’m torn between working and sleeping! I always return from our training events feeling energized about this business. I spend the week in training sessions learning everything from photography techniques to marketing strategies, in general sessions with a horde of colleagues and company VPs discussing travel trends and the future of the industry, and at dinners and other activities networking with representatives from the cruise lines and resorts we partner with as well as other travel advisors in the CruiseOne/Dream Vacations family. And while I come home full of new information and eager put my new knowledge to work, I also come home utterly exhausted!
When people hear that I’m a travel agent I typically get one of two reactions: 1 – travel agents still exist? 2 – you’re soooooo lucky! I bet you get to travel all the time! Well 1 – yes, we sure do exist! And 2 – yes, I am super lucky! And I do get to travel a lot. But there is a BIG difference between traveling for work and traveling for leisure. And National Conference is the ultimate week of traveling for work!
One of the many learning opportunities I had this last week was listening to a panel of agents who are a part of the Circle of Excellence, a distinction given to the top 2% of agencies in our network. I’m fortunate to be an associate for a franchise who is a part of this esteemed group. Always wanting to learn more, and knowing my colleagues are a wealth of information, I attended this panel to see what new insights I could gather from some of my top performing peers. When the panel opened questions to the audience, I asked what they recommended doing to carry the excitement and energy of National Conference into the next few weeks when we all return home to our normal lives. One answer was to create actionable steps. Find three things I was excited about that I could immediately act on.
My first actionable step came easy to me: start a blog. See, another opportunity I had this week was to hear from a speaker who helps companies create blogs. He gave us tips on how to start one. He even showed us where our company websites already had the tools needed to post the blog articles once they were written. And as a former English teacher, specifically a teacher who taught writing (although I much prefer reading!), a blog seemed up my alley.
The stars aligned after that session when I ran into some colleagues who just so happen to have a travel blog. In September I sailed on the Regent Seven Seas Splendor with other agents from our network, and while there I met a couple who told me about the travel blog they started years ago that eventually resulted in them becoming travel agents. When I met them and immediately checked out their blog, my first thought was, “boy that seems like a lot of work”. But when I ran into them at conference just hours after sitting through a session on blogging, it was the sign I needed that this was something I should try.
So here you have it. My first actionable step. My first blog post.
I can’t guarantee I’ll keep up with this. It may prove to be too much work, like my immediate reaction to my colleague’s blog. But two years ago I thought that consistently posting on social media would be too much work. And then after last year’s National Conference I decided one of my actionable steps would be making a schedule of posts for our team’s Facebook page. And if you’re not sure how that’s going a year later, well, I encourage you to join the page and see for yourself.
