It was March of 1982 and although I had learned a lot in travel school, I was green to say the least.
I had never even personally used a travel agent, my parents had never used one, and besides the agency that was next door to the Harvey Bingham School of Travel, I had never been inside a travel agency before….. boy, did I have a lot to learn.
Let me set the stage of the tools that were available back then to explore destinations that one might want to visit. Well there was only the library and the local bookstore, and of course the National Geographic show that would come on each Sunday evening. Other than that you had to visit a travel agency, where you would be given brochures and fliers on different destinations. We had no internet at our finger tips, and a new agent, with little to no travel experience finding a job that actually paid a salary and not just a commission only position was extremely hard to come by. You see, I had visited the Florida Gulf Coast, Disney World (which at the time Epcot had just opened), Washington DC on a school trip and taken my first cruise aboard the Carnival T.S.S. Festival…… I was a newbie, but ready to learn.
I walked into “Travel Fantasies”
an agency in New Orleans East, met the owner Harriet who was the sole travel agent of that agency, and basically talked her into letting me come in for a few hours a day to just help with filing and answering the phones when she ran out to the bank or to make ticket deliveries (yes tickets were handwritten on paper back then). Taking detailed notes was all I was allowed to do, and little by little I learned the art of qualifying customers. Over the course of a couple weeks, I was given some simple tasks to complete, under the watchful eye of Harriet I put together short Disney Trips, easy roundtrips to Houston or Atlanta and even hand wrote a few tickets. Within a month I guess I had proved to Harriet that I was competent enough to actually begin taking calls. Of course I had to run through what the client on the phone had requested, give Harriet my thoughts and course of action and get her approval. I would then do the ground work, assemble the quote and again run it by Harriet for tweaking and suggestions before calling the client back. I guess you could say I was sort of an “Intern” agent, and looking back I am happy that Travel Fantasies was a very low volume agency because it allowed me to get one on one hands on training at a slow pace.
Keep in mind that all these weeks, I was not earning anything, everything was gratis. It wasn’t until I was actually allowed to take a client from a phone call that came in, that wasn’t already one of Harriet’s clients that I was able to earn commission on the booking. I still remember the amount of that commission, which I received 50% of. It was a GoGo Vacations package to Cancun Mexico for a honeymoon couple and the total amount was $848.00 which brought in a whooping $42.40 for me….. This little $42.40 check for me meant that I was finally (at least in my mind) REALLY a travel agent!
E-Tickets were a thing of the distant future in 1982!