Life After Work: Robin, Travel Consultant
What Are You Doing After Work?
A fulfilling retirement journey doesn’t happen by accident. We can’t plan for everything; however, we have to spend time thinking about life after structured work before our careers end.
Robin Christian grew up in the southern suburbs of Chicago. After graduating from Thornton Township High School in Harvey, she earned a B.S. degree in Marketing from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
Robin experienced travel opportunities with her family and civic programs, as a student. She also earned multiple incentive trips as a top healthcare sales representative during her 41-year corporate career. “The more places I visited, the more I wanted to see,” she explained. “I tried to imagine retirement. What can I do that won’t feel like work? Plan travel?? ” When her career ended abruptly through a layoff, she transitioned her hobby into a business plan leveraging skills from her corporate career into entrepreneurship.
Robin honed meeting planning and organizational skills by coordinating events for her corporate customers and national church conferences. Her love for travel, seeing new places, and discovering different cultures led her to tourism as an encore career. Five years before her corporate career ended, Robin began a travel business in her downtime. In 2016, she coordinated a fantastic spring break trip to Washington D.C. for me and my niece.
After retiring, she earned the CLIA-certified cruise specialist designation before achieving three of the four tiers of a Master Cruise Counsellor (MCC). Robin committed to herself that she would participate in travel consultant training, to become certified with any vendor she represented. She continues her education by participating in training modules, cruise ship inspections, familiarization trips sponsored by vendors, and her travel. She’s visited countries on six of the seven continents!
“When I help a client plan a trip, it begins with a conversation,” she says, “I’ll ask a series of questions before developing options.” Occasionally, Robin may join the adventure with her clients. This week she is traveling with clients for two weeks through Asia beginning in Vietnam. “When I was at the currency exchange preparing for this trip, I felt rich,” she laughed and explained, “$400 U.S. dollars equals 7 million Vietnamese dong.” She sends more people to destinations than she accompanies although she admits travel is her addiction.
“I represent an assortment of vendors. I’m a cruise specialist and I do land destination trips for clients. What my clients are buying is expertise,” Robin says. She shared the story of a client interested in a trip to Antarctica. “I reached out to the brand my client was interested in traveling with and completed their certification before coordinating the trip. I wanted to be comfortable with what I was proposing and the experience my client would have on her bucket list trip.” Needless to say, Robin has many repeat clients and referrals from happy travelers. While it sounds like a dreamy retirement, Robin reminds me, she is running a business. www.travelbydesign.expert
Life After Work is a new ongoing series in Older, Bolder & Better! exploring how our colleagues are spending their time. Our life journeys are unique, we approach work differently and how we manage our encore years will be just as diverse. Contact me in the comments if you would like your story featured.
If you work after you retire - it has to be your passion or why do it? Some many skills are transferable.
Good read again. :)
It might be a business, but it’s not a job when you love what you do!