Before she ran global marketing teams, before she sat in boardrooms or rewrote travel strategy, Liz Glover sang.
She didn’t grow up dreaming of marketing budgets or brand strategy (few do). She sang with Opera Australia’s children’s chorus. She danced. And somewhere between piano lessons and choir rehearsals, something clicked.
“I never really felt at home in high school,” she says. “But when I joined the choir, I felt like I had found my people.”
There is a point in every life where something catches. For Glover, that early immersion in the arts lit a fuse. It taught her how to show up, how to keep time, and how to stand quietly in herself, even when the spotlight hit somewhere else.
The long game and the lens
Glover has never claimed to have a five-year plan. “I never ever knew what I wanted to be when I grew up,” she says. “And sometimes I still think I don’t know.” But she has always known how to move forward. To trust momentum. To recognise meaning when it knocks. And to keep saying yes to the work that stirs something real.
“Play the long game,” she says. “Work hard. Be kind. Stay curious. Don’t worry about being interesting. Be interested. You won’t always know where it’s leading, but every job, every conversation, every choice adds something to the picture.”
Today, as Head of Marketing at Adventure World, Glover sits at the intersection of passion and purpose. Her career has spanned arts, sponsorship, media marketing, and global travel brands, but through every role runs a single thread: hope. Not the naive kind, but the determined kind. The kind that roots deep, holds fast, and grows through concrete. It doesn’t wait for applause. It survives. It insists.
“We have to have hope,” she says. “Hope that the work matters, that we’re not just selling the world, but helping protect it. If we don’t have that, we don’t have a career.”
Hope, and hustle
Her first job was as a secretary at the Australian Ballet. She got the role because someone who knew someone knew she was looking. But people saw something in her. You don’t go from a secretary to managing the marketing of one of the biggest broadsheets in the country without something you can’t quite name but never miss. She has it. The click-in-your-gut certainty. The kind of presence that earns its own space.
“I’m a hard worker,” she says simply. “I’m very self-disciplined. And I deliver.”
It’s a work ethic she credits in part to her father, a ten-pound Pom who built one of the country’s first computer exhibitions with little but sheer will.
“I’m very like him,” she says. “Disciplined, dedicated.”
Cracks and clarity
She didn’t fall in love with marketing in a classroom. It happened in the real world, in late nights, impossible deadlines, and the sometimes brutal, satisfying clarity of building something from scratch. But it wasn’t until a trip through Africa that something in her shifted. Kilimanjaro loomed. The air was thin. The scale of the world pressed in and expanded all at once. There was red dust and silence and a thousand untranslatable things she didn’t want to leave behind. A world alive with beauty and contradiction.
It cracked something open.
She came back changed. Travel wasn’t leisure. It was perspective. Power. A reminder that the world isn’t a product. It’s a privilege. And maybe, just maybe, something worth protecting.
Choosing challenge over comfort
Glover found a job for Scenic, but the post was well past the deadline. Most people would scroll past. Glover applied anyway. And she got the job.
Call it audacity. Call it instinct. But mostly, it was preparation meeting boldness. A habit of showing up for what might happen if you do. That’s Glover. She shows up. She delivers. She plays the long game.
From Scenic to Silversea to Adventure World, Glover has built a career not just on brand growth, but on values. She doesn’t sugarcoat the challenges. She’s worked through cruise crises and corporate restructures. She’s had jobs that didn’t feed her soul, and learned from them anyway.
“Even when a job doesn’t light you up, there’s always something to take from it,” she says.
When News Corp invited her back as General Manager of Travel, a friend told her to treat it like a master’s degree, a sharp challenge with lessons built in.
“And I did,” she says. “I learned so much. I worked on a major e-commerce project. I had one of the best managers of my life, someone who showed me what it means to really protect and support a team.”
It became a reminder: even the wrong job can be the right teacher.
Adventure World, though, felt different. At an industry function, she heard Managing Director Neil Rodgers speak.
“That was it for me,” Glover says. “I knew that is what I wanted to do. This was the brand, and the leader, for me.”
Doing the work that matters
Now she’s part of a brand that walks its talk. One that builds community-based tourism that redefines what travel can be.
Even when the headlines scream otherwise, Glover insists: there is still so much hope.
“It is easy to get lost in the despair. But there are all these amazingly beautiful stories of what people are doing, consistently, in their lives, in their businesses, and in travel. I try not to get stuck in that black hole. I put a lens on it. You have to have perspective.”
“You have to look beyond the noise. The stories are out there. But we have to choose to see them.”
In an industry that can too easily commodify people and places, she’s not afraid to ask the hard questions. “We want to grow,” she says. “But we can’t grow at any cost.”
It’s not a line you often hear in the travel trade. But maybe it should be. Maybe what the industry needs now isn’t another performance of progress, but a return to something real. Something honest. Something hopeful.
Like a woman who never knew what she wanted to be when she grew up but followed the music anyway. And found her people.
