What You Need To Know Before Becoming A Travel Agent
Hi everybody, I am Stacey a “Certified Travel & Tourism Specialist & Cerified Travel Agent”. In this post I will write about my own experience, I’m not saying that every person goes through the same thing. I will start with some major key points to have on mind before deciding to become a travel agent and what I have learn about it. Hope this post it’s helpful if you haven’t decide if you want to be part of the travel industry.
Why You Want To Be A Travel Agent?
Most people decide to study and become a travel agent just for the discounts. Lol, honestly most of the times you don’t even get a huge discount, but some agencies and companies offer to travel agents 20% off, I’m not saying it’s bad to save 20% off in your trip, but what I mean it’s that do not decide to be part of this industry just for the discounts, because there exist some companies that doesn’t even offer any discount to travel agents. So, have the right goal and reason before becoming a travel agent. Ask yourself: Why Do I Want To Be A Travel Agent?
Learn Step By Step
Leaning and being patient is key to be a travel agent. I know people that have become a travel agent easier. They just got a job at an agency and they offered them to take a training of 3 months and they did became travel agents, that’s it. But that didn’t happened to me I had to learn step by step. First of all I decided that I wanted to be a travel agent at 14 years old. I started studying at 16 years old in “Penn Foster”. I studied “Travel & Tourism Specialist”, I finished the program and I took the “TAP Exam”, a Travel Agent Proficiency (TAP) certification exam developed by the American Society of Travel Agents (ASTA) and The Travel Institute. And I passed, basically I finished everything in 18 months and I am happy. So I had to be patient and some times I got stressed but it was worth it, I love what I do.
Put In Practice What You Are Learning
Why do I say that? Well, being a travel agent is more than booking a flight. You have to learn codes, memorize them to be able to recognize them, plus you have to be constantly updated with everything that happens around the world because every thing that happens affect the travel industry. So if you don’t practice what you are learning you will forget everything, you don’t want that to happen. What I did to keep memorizing and puting in practice what I’ve learned at that moment was to take good notes, well explained, and I opened this blog to share with others what I was learning. And thanks to this blog I had great opportunities to make some collaborations and much more, and the opportunities keeps opening. So I recommend you to open a blog if you like to write and share with others what you’ve learned and create content. For example if you don’t like to write you can open an Instagram account and create content of what you have learned. Without realizing you’ll be the one opening doors for yourself.
Keep Learning
Like I said before you have to be constanty updated with everything that happends around the world, because everything that happens affect the travel industry. As a travel agent you have to know the restrictions of the countries, you have to know about visas, passports and much more… so basically you never stop learning, that’s exciting. Plus, you constantly have webinars and meetings of new destinations and what do they offer. So, yeah is an exciting career that never stops and it constantly changes.
One piece of advice I can give you is to choose your specialization. At first I wanted to do everything but I decided and realized what I enjoyed the most. So now I am specializing in Accommodation and I love it.
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Stacey M.
(Travel & Tourism Specialist)
