When your mind wanders – on your commute, say, or when folding laundry, where does it go? Do you replay conversations you had throughout the day, think about a tv show you just watched, mentally write your grocery list, or ponder how good it would feel just to crawl back into bed?
I think about itineraries.
Typically, my wandering mind inner monologue goes something like this: Does it make more sense to go to Dublin first or Edinburgh? What if I pushed the flight back a week and left earlier in the morning? Then there would be more time to explore the city the first day but you’re usually jetlagged the first day. The Delta flight was cheaper but the United flight made fewer stops and the Delta flight only had an hour layover, is that going to be enough in Minneapolis? What’s the airport code for Minneapolis again?
I don’t know why I am the way that I am.
Most kids like to collect something and like many kids in the 1980s, I did collect baseball cards for a while. At some point, I started collecting shot glasses from the various places we went on vacation while I was growing up. Since I was only about nine years old, I don’t think I understood the point of a shot glass but I did get a little thrill every time I got to add another one to my shelf when we got home. By the time I graduated high school, I had about 35 states and a couple of Canadian provinces represented on my shelf.
Over the years, this has somehow morphed into an obsession – not the shot glasses, but the places they came from. More specifically, I became enthralled with the HOW and the WHAT of travel, although the WHERE still held importance. In other words, how does a person literally go from Point A to Point B?
One of my favorite parts of planning travel is the research. (Yes, my friends think I’m weird). It’s very easy for me to lose track of time when I’m comparing hotel locations on a map or looking for the cheapest dates to fly. If I’m researching a new destination, I’ll typically start by reading a few articles or watching a short video about the destination to get an overview. Sometimes, I’ll do a deeper dive by listening to a podcast episode or two about the particular destination. With this valuable context, I’ll start looking at logistics. I’ll pull up a map on Google and start looking at the different areas of the town/region/country and identifying hotels that are well-located. I look at the distance to different attractions and switch over to the street level view to get an idea of what the area around the hotel looks like. I check out which airports are nearby and look at the best ways to get from the airport to the hotel. Sometimes I make spreadsheets or even whole google folders. It may be slightly unhealthy.
My mind is always churning and building itineraries, even subconsciously. I wake up thinking about them many days. It’s easy for me to overwhelm a client with too many options and I’m having to constantly edit down my thought process to keep myself from giving them fifteen different ways to fly from Florida to New York. (MCO-LGA or TPA-JFK or GNV-ATL-JFK or do I just tell them to take the train?)
I think that’s what I love most about being a travel agent. Planning my own trips is super fun but planning a trip for a client is like solving a giant jigsaw puzzle with a dash of matchmaking thrown in. Not only do I get to figure out the best way to travel somewhere, but I get to figure out the best way to travel for that particular client. Success feels twice as awesome when the last piece of the jigsaw is fitted into place.
