I grew up in Maplewood, New Jersey — a suburb about an hour outside New York City, close enough that you’d think travel stories would have been part of the air. They weren’t. All I heard about growing up was money: how much people made, which part of town that got you into, and what it took to eventually make it to the city itself. Nobody was talking about where they’d been. They were talking about where they were trying to get to, financially, without ever really leaving.

So when I got into FIT for Fashion Merchandising, certain I was going to be a designer, it felt like I’d already made it — I was in the city everyone back home was chasing. Then, in my third year, I studied abroad in Florence, and I realized how small that goal actually was. I’d been studying Italian for a year by that point and kept up lessons while I was there. I rented an apartment with a fellow student, got a codice fiscale, the whole thing. I wasn’t visiting, I was living there. I dated someone, met his mother, ate lampredotto once and never again. I figured out how to fly to another country for less than a bus ticket home would’ve cost. I found a bakery at 2am by following the smell of bread through side streets after a night out. I learned the cappuccino-after-noon rule the hard way, from a look, not a lecture. None of that was on a syllabus. It’s just what happens when you actually live somewhere instead of just seeing it.

That feeling didn’t leave when I came home. It just sat quietly in the background while I built a career as an Account Executive — first at one AdTech company, then another, then another. I was good at it, and it paid the bills well. I got the praise, the “you’ll move up next year,” and watched that ceiling stay exactly where I’d found it, no matter how hard I worked, while people I’d consistently outperformed kept climbing past me. I was burned out before I had a word for it. My cousin was looking into becoming a travel advisor around that time, and she asked why I hadn’t considered it too. It felt obvious, but actually building it was not. I took the trainings, started social accounts that went nowhere, and kept my AE job to pay my mortgage. For a long time, “Travel Advisor” mostly meant booking my mom’s hotel stays.

Two things changed that. One was realizing how much I’d genuinely loved the parts of my old career that had nothing to do with sales quotas — the company offsites, the SKOs, the trips where an entire team got flown somewhere just to be in a room together. I always felt lucky to be one of the people who got picked to go. It took me a while to notice that someone had to plan all of it, and that the someone was never me. The other is more intimate: working as a banquet server at a newly opened, high-end hotel in Charleston. I’ve worked enough shifts inside actual weddings and corporate events to know what planners are actually managing in real time — what they’re expecting from a property, what guests need without knowing to ask, the difference between an event that feels effortless and one that just looks that way from a distance.

Those two things shaped what I actually do now: corporate retreats and incentive trips, wedding weekends spent working alongside the planners already running the show, and retreats built for people bringing their own community somewhere with intention.

I’m an independent affiliate of Fora Travel, part of the Virtuoso network, which means the relationships we’ve built with hotels and resorts work in your favor, not just mine.

Reach out, and you’re not getting a reservations line. You’re getting me — the same person on the first call and when the group returns home.