10 years.

I spent a lot of my time in sales specialising in tailor-made itineraries, and one time I had a father and son, whose son was studying Ecology at university, who wanted to spend some time in the Amazon together. Over a period of time, I worked with a team based in Ecuador and created an itinerary where they stayed in multiple lodges across the Ecuadorian Amazon, where they had guides in each location that specialised in the wildlife of each biome they stayed in – from swamps, to rainforest, to rivers.

Asking questions is the biggest way of personalising experiences for clients. Two holidays may look similar, but when you talk to each client and find out more details (such as why they’re travelling, their previous travel locations, what they like to do etc.), you’ll find that those two holidays are worlds apart from each other, so you can then recommend experiences or elements of the holiday that would be right for them.

I once created a trip for an older gentleman, who was travelling across Southern Spain on his own, where he wanted two weeks in multiple locations with experiences in each location. After working closely with him, he ended up learning Flamenco in Seville, had a private tour around the Alhambra in Granada, had visits to local villages around the Andalusian region, and much more, and returned home tired, but very happy.

For service levels, you can’t go wrong with the Far East, especially around Thailand, however many more destinations are now embodying the Thai service standards, so I was impressed to see hotels around the Indian Ocean and the Middle East with just as high service standards.

In the Sales Operations role, we often have to work our magic assist our clients with last-minute issues. Very recently, one of our clients was travelling to Dubai in two days time, where the wife was sadly hospitalised briefly before their trip. We worked together to push the dates forward, where the hotel luckily had availability and the flights weren’t too much more expensive on the new dates, and we ended up saving their family holiday, rather than them having to cancel the entire trip.

We are all here for the same reason - the need to travel, and the joy of helping to create that experience for someone else.

Every year as children, my parents would take me and my brother to a little town outside of Rimini in Italy for a week, where we always stayed in the same slightly run-down hotel owned by a family who recognised my parents every time we visited. As far as abroad holidays go, it was a little basic, but it’s some of my favourite childhood memories with my family.

I travelled to the USA with the USA Tourism Board, and at the end of the trip, they flew us to Phoenix, Arizona, and drove us 20 minutes into the Sonoran Desert, where we had a huge dinner set up and party created for us. Just us, and nothing else for miles around other than huge cacti and the Sonoran rocks!

I recently went to Dubai to experience a lot of our most popular hotels across The Palm, Jumeirah Beach and along the JBR. It was a busy, but eye-opening trip!

Bintan is a tiny Indonesian island that you can get to by ferry from Singapore. It’s one of those places where you can imagine places like Bali used to be like before tourism found it – nothing around except incredible beaches, forests, amazing wildlife, and of course, the odd luxury hotel!

Watching the shadows of elephants and hippos passing by literally meters away from the canvas walls of our tent in Zambia, after spending the day kayaking upstream on the Zambezi!

I always take the same small backpack, which goes with me to all of the countries I’ve visited. It’s quite worse for wear these days and has been semi-retired to being a day bag, but I couldn’t imagine travelling without it!

Thinking that a cloudy day in March in Tenerife was reason enough to not wear sun cream. I was very lucky to only come away with a scar on my ankle from how badly burnt I was!