Professional Experience
Since falling into the world of travel in the 1980’s I’ve been fortunate enough to work across many sectors of the industry and held senior positions with great companies such as Unijet, Virgin and Club Med. My career started with mobile homes in France but then took me on a fascinating and eclectic journey through holiday cottages, short and long-haul tour operations, cruise, ski, OTA’s, airlines and more recently travel PR, marketing and representation. The majority of my career has been based in the UK, but I’ve also gained invaluable experience working in both France and Germany and along the way served terms as a director of both the Federation of Tour Operators and the Institute of Travel and Tourism.
Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.
- Winston Churchill
How'd you get here?
Careers advice at my school was sketchy to say the least. Mrs. Bush, the Domestic Science teacher had drawn the short straw and it was in a 15-minute slot with her that my future would be decided. When told that I wanted to be a deep-sea diver, she flipped through the ten or so career options she had in front of her and declared that she’d have to get back to me. A week later a slip of paper appeared in my pigeon hole detailing the only career advice I’ve ever received – “Deep-sea diver: Minimum age 24. Life expectancy 7 years.” Having left school and after surviving a few years as a motorcycle courier, I’d fallen into a safer, but extremely boring job with a German shipping company in London. My mother, knowing I wanted to go abroad, saw a small classified ad in the local paper from a company looking for an operations manager to work on their mobile home sites in France. A month later I arrived on the West Coast and was immersed in an industry that I was never going leave.