There’s a moment in every good trip when life widens. An unexpected conversation on a train. The light dotting a lake. These are small things. They are also everything. Fiona Gent works in those small things, building trips that let her clients live inside them.
Her work is the steady practice of really listening and holding the thread from first idea to welcome-home call. She has spent a life moving toward the work that fits her, and toward the people who trust her with what they love most.
“One of my favourite things is hearing about the trip,” she tells Karryon. “Two weeks after my clients come home, when everyone else has stopped listening, I still want to. That’s when the details come out, the things they’ll carry forever.”
It says much about her: Fiona is someone who really listens (even now, when she’s the one being interviewed). She doesn’t rush or interrupt. She waits, excited for the real stories to surface. She’ll ask what surprised them, what moment they keep thinking about, what they’d change if they could.
It’s in those meandering, genuine conversations that Fiona finds what truly matters. She listens as both a devoted advisor, determined to understand her clients, and as a deeply open and caring person who is genuinely interested. Sometimes, and definitely in the case of Fiona, the two can’t be easily separated. Her empathy and her insight come from the same place.
Every itinerary becomes a reflection of what she’s learned, thoughtful, human, and precise. It’s the kind of care that makes clients feel recognised, even before their bags are packed.
When the world got bigger
Fiona didn’t grow up with passports full of stamps. “I grew up in regional Victoria and we used to spend every summer on Phillip Island,” she says.
“That was the vacation of the year.”
The very idea of travelling any farther was limited to something she only knew from the glossy brochures left at the local travel agency, often picked over by school kids for craft projects. The wider world lived on paper, cut into collages of elsewhere.
“I became a bit fascinated by the US,” she says, remembering how American television shows threaded themselves into her childhood. Through that screen, she met voices and skylines that felt impossibly far away yet oddly familiar, as if she already belonged to them.
So when the chance came to visit the States, a 19-year-old Fiona leapt at it.
“I went to work at a summer camp in Minnesota in the middle of nowhere, and absolutely loved it. I was a water ski instructor for two summers. It was fantastic.”
“I remember landing in LA, and it was the first time I’d been surrounded by people with American accents. And that was really strange. It was the first time I had been surrounded by people that all spoke in a different way.”
She admitted she was almost too nervous to speak, afraid her own voice would sound out of place in the sea of accents. The world tilted wider in that moment.
That kind of first day stays with you, and later shapes the way you help others through theirs.
A life rerouted
For all her success as a travel advisor, it was never part of The Plan. The path she paved was not the one she ended up walking.
“I went to uni in Western Australia to study exercise science, because that’s what every good travel agent needs,” she laughs.
That degree led somewhere unexpected. “I landed a role with Disney Cruise Line in their recreation department, and later moved across to Princess Cruises,” she says.
And as can happen on a cruise ship, Fiona would sometimes end up selling shore excursions as well. That was her sales experience.
“When I came home, I knew I wanted to share my love of travel, that I wanted more travel in my life, and so I applied for a job as a travel agent.”
Building a business and a family
From Victoria to WA, the USA to the Gold Coast, Fiona found home and, with her husband, started a family. When her children were young, the home-based model of MTA offered the flexibility she needed.
“MTA just seemed like a really great fit,” she says. “For the first five or six years that I was with MTA, I was really very part-time. Then when the kids hit school, I was like, ‘Okay, well, let’s do this. Let’s ramp it up and grow the business’. And then I started working full-time, and it just went, boom. It’s been 16 years now.”
That ‘boom’ came from patience and presence. She made herself visible in the places that mattered.
“Even little things like turning up to the school drop off with your name badge on,” she says. “When you’re working on your own, you are your own brand.”
She remembers a speaker at an agency conference who asked a question that stayed with her. “Are you a dream creator, or are you an order taker?” she remembers. Fiona’s answer has never shifted. “I knew I wanted to be a dream creator.”
That is why her client base makes sense. Luxury families, multi-gen families… where no trip is the same.
And because she and her husband genuinely love travelling with their kids, they’ve experienced the world the way many of their clients do. She knows what it takes to move small humans through big spaces and keep it joyful.
Family as a way of seeing
Travel changed when she became a parent. But it also changed Fiona’s work.
“I think being a parent has changed the way that I consult,” she says. “I understand how precious time is and how important it is to make memories that truly matter, and I love being able to do that for my clients and give them something that they’ll talk about for years.
“I love the shared memories that you have when you travel with your family or with your people.”
But it can get complex when trying to cater to different needs, and she knows this well. She laughs about her daughter’s unique way of rating accommodation.
“My daughter judges a hotel room on the quality of its tub,” she says, describing her love for the outdoor bathtub on the deck of a private villa in the Maldives, a small, unforgettable luxury that reminds Fiona why the little details matter so much.
Navigating the future
Things have changed a lot since her early days as a travel agent, and they’re changing even faster now. So how does Fiona keep her edge in a world where technology moves quicker than planes?
“When you have a client base that’s built on repeats and referrals, it’s really about building relationships with your clients and understanding them as people,” she says.
For Fiona, technology can inform, but it can’t interpret. Algorithms can suggest hotels, but they can’t know the person who will open the door. A filtered destination isn’t real. A conversation with ChatGPT isn’t the same as one with a real person. Connection is the difference, the heartbeat of travel that no code can recreate. Connection, Fiona believes, is what makes travel, and life, meaningful.
Her clients want to feel that connection too. They want to be understood. Fiona is still that human voice at the end of the line, still the person who knows the right place, the right moment, the right way to make a trip feel like theirs.
That’s the balance she holds, using the best of what technology offers while never letting it get in the way of care, empathy, and the simple grace of being her.
What stays with you
Fiona creates the conditions that allow people to reconnect. With themselves, with each other, and with the world. It might be a family becoming a family again, somewhere else. It might be friends rediscovering an ease they’d forgotten, or a solo traveller finally finding quiet. She makes room for a grandparent to hold court over a long lunch, for a parent to sit on a balcony in the early light and remember who they are.
She is in the business of dreams and memory. And that is why people return. Because they can feel that she listens, that she cares about the parts that last.
Some advisors sell travel. Fiona Gent sells time, arranged with care, so that what matters has the best chance to happen.
