I often tell people that I was born to do this job and I believe that 1000%!
With the 2-year anniversary of my company, Embrace the Journey Travel, coming up July 1, 2019, I decided to share my story and my heart. I plan to have my team share their stories too, so that guests who choose to do business with us, understand our hearts and whom they are planning with.
I don’t remember a time in my life that I didn’t dream about travel. I can remember being a 5-year-old child and creating plane tickets in my mind.
When I turned 16, I was able to get a job, worked on the student line making weed eaters. I saved 90% of my money so I could buy a plane ticket and fly across the country to stay in Ohio with my best friend Erin.
Erin’s family traveled with me the entire month I was there. That experience enriched my life and I grew in ways only travel can make you grow. This experience started my passion to enrich other people’s lives, and my own, through travel.
I allowed fear to hold me back from that dream for years. The fear of failure, the fear of letting anyone down, the fear of what people would think of me, and the biggest fear that I developed after 9-11, the fear of flying.
I had a terrible panic attack on a flight back from Las Vegas over 10 years ago, and I allowed that flight to ground me for years. My Aunt Kathy held my hand and prayed with me for hours on that flight. I had countless people praying with me that God would deliver me from that fear. I am thankful that I can now say, I sleep like a baby on flights. I no longer suffer from a fear of flying and I help my guests who have that same fear of flying, to travel and overcome it.
The dream of helping people enrich their lives with travel while making the world a better place was still there. I kept praying that, in some way, my dream would become a reality.
I began my introduction to work in the travel industry for another company. I was working in a travel-based business model in my dream field, but the restrictive model did not allow me to fully serve my clients in the way I wanted to. So, in July of 2017, I opened Embrace the Journey Travel. It was a BIG LEAP of faith to open my own company. The passion of helping my guests live their best lives with travel is what helped pushed me past the fear and make the leap.
I have my Dream Team that I get to work with every day, and when I say every day, it really is 24/7, 365 days a year. Travel never sleeps. Embrace the Journey Travel is currently made up of Angel Waite from Nebraska, Danielle Hupp from Virginia, Jordan Vickers from Florida, April Watson from Indiana, Tracy Devlin from Pennsylvania, and Tonya Walker from Illinois.
We have spent thousands of hours training and attending meetings to learn the travel industry inside out. Tens of thousands of dollars have been spent on education, licenses, lawyers, insurances, and computer programs to help us plan better trips. In the last year, I have seen all of this come together, my team and I are planning amazing trips and watching our guests create memories that will last a lifetime. The last 5 years have been amazing, but the last year has been mind-blowing! It’s been incredible what my team and I have been able to build and create with clients.
It’s not easy to be a travel planner. We deal with hundreds of moving pieces at all times, trying to make sure our guests get a seamless planned trip filled with memories. Believe me, the airlines make that hard! LOL. Every day I get up so excited to serve my clients and team. I want to thank our guests for allowing Embrace the Journey Travel to be part of their vacation. We are so thankful you give us the honor of being part of your trip planning. It’s an honor we don’t take lightly.
When you book a trip with Embrace the Journey Travel, you work with a full-time professional vacation planner who is highly trained, passionate about your trip, and very invested in making sure you have an amazing experience that you can’t get from anywhere else, especially an online booking engine.