This is the story of a woman who’s been in the industry for 40 years (yeah, we know, she’s clearly found the fountain of youth on her many travels). It’s the story of a champagne influencer; of a woman who continues to invest in her community and her clients. It’s the story of dedication, resilience, and bloody hard work. And, perhaps most importantly, it’s the story of someone who really cares. This is the story of Personal Travel Manager Kerry Cleasby.
Her godfather was the general manager at Jetabout and on the Qantas board.
“I pestered him every family gathering for years to help me find a job with Qantas,” Kerry says of her younger, ambitious self.
The pestering paid off and, straight from her country high school, she was appointed the Junior Mail Clerk for Jetabout.
Her first job in the industry put her in charge of delivering telexes and mailing documents to travel agents.
“It was the 80s!”
“I loved the industry from Day One,” Kerry says.
“It was a mix of non-stop flying to new destinations, functions and great Sydney parties.”
It was the heyday of cheap Qantas staff travel rates, Kerry says. So the now National Sales Coordinator, tried to spend every day of her annual leave overseas.
“The love of travel was what got me started and Qantas was the vehicle that gave me crazy weekends in Hawaiʻi and Bali and let me see the world really cheaply and thoroughly early on.”
But despite all this travel Kerry still longed to experience the Aussie rite of passage that is the backpacking trip. So at 23, she resigned and spent two years backpacking through Europe and Africa.
“No wonder we’re such a resilient lot.”
On her eventual return home (hitchhiking through Africa was frowned upon by her worried parents), Kerry left Sydney for Brisbane and a gig at Adventure World as their Africa specialist.
But the industry being what it is, Kerry found herself retrenched three years in a row (twice on Christmas Eve). In 1995, she was back at Adventure World in a role she’d always wanted and where she stayed for “five fabulous years”.
Taking time out of the industry to have her two girls and look after her sick mother, Kerry worried about being out of the workforce.
“Any woman that leaves her career to care for children will know the uncertainty of trying to get back into the workforce. You’ve lost your contacts and technology has sped past you. The longer I was away from the workforce, the more I worried about fitting back in.”
“Running my own show.”
Kerry couldn’t see how she could work away from home, but her first two attempts at starting a home-based business didn’t “warrant the effort” she says.
The art of itinerary design was an unexpected love of Kerry’s. And working directly with clients who had the money to do it right was appealing. Enter TravelManagers Australia.
But it’s hard work.
“I know my clients are going to come back raving. That’s the joy of being a Personal Travel Manager (PTM). Knowing how much joy the itinerary and experiences you designed give your clients.
“I think when I came to retail, seven or eight years ago, I had travelled so much myself and I had taken my kids around the world. And I was always interested in the detail. To me, the best part of the holiday was getting the detail right.
“So when I started booking clients I couldn’t just book their hotel! I was like, “Well, what are you going to do in Rome?”
“So the ability to do that for clients was a game changer. It meant that when those clients came back, using me for their next holiday was a given. And they will often email me while they’re away and say, ‘This is so amazing! Let’s start talking about our next holiday so I’ve got something happy to come home to.’ So my business grew quickly with that.”
“I have labelled myself a champagne influencer.”
These days, Kerry needs to be “quite selective” about whom she takes on board.
“I need people to understand that I charge fees, and not everybody is ready to do that. I need people to do fairly nice holidays because the way I work takes me a lot more time to get it all together. So there needs to be a little bit of money in it for me. And I need people that just let me book what I know is right.”
But Kerry still really enjoys her community.
“My main marketing focus to build my client base has remained the same. Spend time socialising and investing in your community.
“I find it easy to talk to people face-to-face in social settings. Who doesn’t like to talk about their next holiday? I usually go home with a booking or two.
“I have labelled myself a ‘champagne influencer’. No hard sell is required, just relationship building, bubbles in hand.”
“These are my clients, my friends.”
These days Kerry is designing the travel of the kids of clients too. And there’s a lot of pressure with that.
“You know these kids. You’ve seen them grow up. You want to do it right.”
“During the height of the pandemic, we had to do our jobs for nothing. And then we had to do it again for nothing because you rebooked and then cancelled again. And the love wanes. But not for me.
“I have such wonderful clients that the idea that they were stuck or they were going to lose their money was just miserable. And so you just couldn’t have that happen.
“And then all of those clients, the moment the borders open, contacted me virtually on the same day and said, ‘Right, Kerry: here are the next 12 months of travel.’
“It didn’t matter how many hours I worked, there weren’t enough. But I had to do it because these people had stuck by me for the last three years. These are my clients, my friends.”
“Together we can do anything.”
There is a need for travel advisors to be an expert on the whole world, says Kerry.
“And there are times that I actually don’t know the answer. But I know who does. I have a knowledge bank in my fellow Personal Travel Manager. I have the TravelManagers National Partnerships Office.”
And she has her suppliers.
“A client told me years ago that I have a superpower: the ability to fix the seemingly unfixable.
It’s actually a Personal Travel Manager pre-requisite. But we can only activate this power if we have good supplier relationships.
“I used to joke to suppliers that I don’t book them unless we have shared a drink, and I have your mobile number on speed dial. And while that was tongue-in-cheek, my relationship with suppliers is very important. Having been a sales rep, I understand their value and perspective.”
At last year’s TravelManagers Conference, Kerry told her fellow Personal Travel Managers that after all the twists and turns, after the wars, the global financial instability, the pandemic, she knows that she is in the right place.
“I have found my tribe,” she said.
“Together we can do anything.”
