First of all, know that I am not new to the travel agency business. This all began about 12 years ago, when I took a class at my local Vocational-Technical school in the 'Travel Industry Training Program'. This class was three months long, Monday thru Friday, for four hours a day. I had a wonderful teacher, that had been in the business for many years. Sadly, I was only one of three students, and when we graduated, they decided to cancel future classes in it. I was trained on the Sabre booking system, and we had to memorize all U.S. city codes, as well as many of the frequently used international codes. I did graduate as the top in my class (but as I stated, there was only 3 of us! lol).
Graduating was followed by an immediate hiring at a 'call center' in my area. Sadly, they hired people that had never had any training before that, and I went through another paid training there - however, they used System One booking system, so it did take a small amount of time to learn that, but all booking systems vary only slightly. Booking systems are a lot like UNIX, if you know what that is, meaning completely blank screen and you must know the commands to bring up anything.
Anyway, at the 'call center', I began on the over night shift (11pm-7am). I finally worked my way up to 5pm-1am, then 3pm-10pm. After approximately a year in the 'air, hotel, car department', I was able to advance to the 'cruise & tour' department where I worked a prime shift of 10am-6pm - perfect for the lady (like me) that likes to stay up late and get up late, while still getting home in time to watch television prime-time at night. This was the best job I ever had, and I was very sad when the company sold out to a huge corporation that had many problems with their workers. So I quit.
Within a week, I was lucky enough to find a job at a local 'mom & pop' travel agency that had 3 locations in my area. After working a few months at the original location, I was promoted to running the smaller store all by myself. I opened, met with clients and booked their travel, and closed. This lasted for almost six months, when a few of the other travel agents got together and bought out the smaller location that I had ran. Since I had just got married that very year, and my husband had a well paying job and I liked to travel with him for business, we mutually slacked off on my hours until I simply did not work there anymore.
That was my travel agency experience, until last year (2007), when I was able to secure a temporary job (3 months) running one of the local travel agencies. This agency owner was....interesting, to say the least....knew nothing about travel at all, except wanting the perks, and basically threw me into doing EVERYTHING all by myself. (I soon found out why he'd had so many employees over his short life as owner of that agency) When the temp. contract ran out, and I realized he wanted me to keep going as it had been, being a slave for $8 an hour, I said I was worth WAY more than that and headed out of there, knowing I could make much more as well as having a super cool boss (myself, lol).
Therein begins my story of STARTING A HOME TRAVEL AGENCY FROM SCRATCH.
