How I Became a Travel Agent and Started My Own Company

Hello! My name is Cheryl McGlynn and I am the agency owner of Carry on the Magic Vacations. I wanted to take some time to introduce myself and tell my story of how I became a travel agent and how that lead to the start of my very own agency!

Funny enough, I actually started my career as a travel agent and even went to travel school back in 1998 (please don’t do that math). After completing school, I accepted a job at a brick and mortar travel agency but shortly after starting the job, I found out that they were going out of business. I ended up switching career paths and having an incredible career but I never lost my love of planning, not only our personal family trips, but for others too.

In 2018, I re-entered the travel world as an agent. As you can imagine, a lot had changed since 1998. While at that agency, I really focused on learning my craft and developing relationship with my clients and vendors. In 2021, I decided I needed a change and joined a new team of agents that allowed me the ability to do my own marketing. Wanting to take full advantage of this new opportunity, I decided to take a training course to better assist my clients. Through the training, I learned some amazing skills and did a deep introspective look into what I really wanted to achieve in the travel space.

I take great pride in coaching my team members at my other job to be successful in their roles (it’s my favorite part of that job). Ultimately this led to the realization that I want to own my own travel agent and grow a team of a strong team of agents. Agents whose mission is to help our clients create amazing trips, but more importantly, create memories to last a lifetime. And my job as agency owner is to help them focus on not only making our clients dream vacations happen, but making our agents dreams come true as well.

It has admittedly been wild to start a travel agency in the midst of the pandemic but it’s also allowed me and my team time to get everything in order and prepared to provide our clients with the most magical memories possible. If you are interested in learning more about becoming a travel agent yourself, please reach out or visit our “Join Our Team” page for more details.