SuperAgent: Meet Marlys Aballi
by Cheryl Rosen /Photo: Twitter
Marlys Aballi isn’t one to take no for an answer. As a young mother she was a pioneer in what would later become a wave of travel professionals working from home. Now she runs a host agency with 20 independent contractors.
It was Aballi’s sister’s friend who got her into the travel business. She was just 19 when the friend opened an agency, and she volunteered to help out. “I was young and it sounded so exciting that I worked there for three months for free,” Aballi says.
In just a few weeks, she was bitten by the travel bug. She went looking at other positions in other industries, but after a week of job hunting it was clear that nothing else would grab her attention the way travel did. Aballi was hooked.
But it wasn’t easy. Over the course of 30 years she spent the first five working with an agency that also operated its own tours, and then launched a Uniglobe agency as a qualifying manager. Within a year she became a mom—and her dream of running her own business from home came to life.
“I convinced the owner to let me work at home; I was one of the first outside sales people with access to a GDS from home at Uniglobe,” she says.
Over the next few years Aballi went back to working full time as a front-line agent, but all the while she dreamed of running a business of her own, from her own home.
When she finally built up the courage to launch Connection to Cruise, “my peers all discouraged the idea of a home-operated, cruise-only agency. I was scared to death, but at the same time I knew it was something I had to try or I could never live with myself. Thankfully, they were wrong,” she says. “Now I have grown my business as host agency and have 20 home-based independent contractors.”
Aballi does acknowledge that she could not have done it all on her own. Her husband is the salesman and P.R. specialist who brings the business clients; “he brings so much to the table. He’s the Networking King—he’ll read a story in the newspaper and call the person up and say, ‘Let’s put some ideas together for a group cruise.’ ”
While looking into chartering a yacht for a customer from China, for example, George started chatting with the captain, who gave the couple a bottle of wine and the telephone number of the vineyard’s owner. George called him up, they met for lunch, and Connection to Cruise has hosted three wine-tasting cruises for him, and is working on a fourth.
They’re also doing a Lassie cruise with John Provost, who played Timmy in the 50s TV show, and working with Brian Beirne, who is known as "Mr. Rock N' Roll,” on a rock music themed cruise.
Aballi noted also that joining and being part of the NEST consortium “has been one of the best decisions. I was on my own until I joined NEST, but being a member of a consortium such as NEST has been a great support, offering a plethora of tools, marketing materials, booking engines, help when we need it, networking opportunities, and last but not least, the opportunity to earn higher commissions.”
So If she were starting out today, would she do things differently?
“If I were just starting out new I’d definitely specialize in a niche market like Africa, river cruises, or destination weddings. I’ve learned over the years coaching and mentoring new agents that It can be overwhelming to try to learn every destination and product,” she says. “I encourage my agents to focus on a destination or product they are passionate about and they will be successful. But if the question is would I do things differently if I could do it over, absolutely not.”