Advisor Insights: Jenny Ellis – It’s All About Family

The travel industry is facing uncertainty due to tariffs and trade actions by the US against Canada. Many advisors are finding themselves having to switch gears and adapt to changes in what Canadian travellers want in their next vacation so it’s important to stay in touch with what’s happening on the front lines. 

Jenny Ellis has been an advisor since 2016, beginning her career with Flight Centre. After the pandemic, she transitioned to selloffvacations.com in Hamilton. She says now more than ever people want to book with a human as opposed to online and truly value the knowledge and expertise of travel advisors.

“It’s not an easy career,” she tells Travel Market Report Canada. “You have to be so driven to be a travel agent. I do hours and hours of training every month about different destinations and different cruise ships, it’s intense. It’s not as easy as people think it is who don’t work in our industry.”

Ellis is a self-proclaimed Disney fanatic who knows the product inside out.

“I do a lot of Disney — nobody else in the office wants to touch it, because it’s so complex,” she says with a laugh. “It’s so in depth and it’s hard to really know it unless you been many times like I have. I find for me personally, with Disney bookings, travel has dropped more because of the dollar exchange rate, rather than what’s happening politically.

Travellers still want to go to Disney however and when you do factor in this crazy time right now, they are now thinking ‘maybe we’ll do Disney in Paris instead of Orlando.’ At this point with our dollar, it’s almost the same US exchange rate as the Euro.”

Ellis says she’s seeing a trend with her Caribbean bookings; more and more are becoming group family bookings of 10-12 people.

“I’m finding there’s big shift from before COVID where it was usually friends and girlfriend getaways.  Now it’s grandma and grandpa who want to take the whole family away and create family memories with their grandkids.

They don’t want to wait anymore, and they don’t care what it costs. Grandma and grandpa are coming on these trips, and they’re paying for them. The cost of trips have gotten high lately and that doesn’t even faze them.”

Ellis thinks that trend of larger family groups will continue throughout 2025, as she said the pandemic reminded us all just how much travel is important.

“We’re getting a lot of inquiries for Europe and also for more common places like Mexico but what people are looking for now is something to do other than just lay on a beach. They’re looking for their bucket-list adventures in any destination with their families and they want to create memories and don’t care how much it costs.

They want to see the world and now they’re not waiting. They’re saying we want to do this now, we want to make it happen now with our families.”

Ellis has been putting that trend in action for a while now herself, as she travels often with her six year old son. Together they’ve been to Spain, and all the islands like Cuba, Jamaica, Mexico, Dominican, Aruba and will be in NYC in May before heading off this summer to the UK.

“He asked to go to England because of Peppa Pig,” she laughs.

“I used to be such an independent traveller, I used to go everywhere by myself,” Ellis says. “I would take off on weekend trips, but now travelling with a tiny human is such a different experience, regardless of where I am.

I get where my clients are coming from.”