Lisa Kraiger to TMP Calgary Advisors: Don’t Be Afraid to Rewrite Your Career Itinerary

Twenty-four years in the travel industry have taught Lisa Kraiger plenty. But perhaps one of the most important lessons is that experience alone isn’t enough to prepare travel advisors for what comes next.

Speaking at the third annual Travel Market Place Calgary, the travel advisor, agency owner and founder of Expert Travel Alliance traced a career that has taken her from a ski hill and travel call centre to Flight Centre Travel Group, home-based selling, team building and, ultimately, establishing her own independent agency.

Along the way came marriage, three children, a move from British Columbia to Alberta, a retail travel agency that opened just six weeks before COVID crushingly shut it down, and plenty of reinvention.

Kraiger’s message to advisors was that careers don’t necessarily follow carefully mapped-out plans — and they don’t have to.

“We don’t have to know where an interest is leading before it has value,” she said. “We just have to pay attention to it.” 

That lesson is particularly relevant for newcomers being encouraged to choose a niche almost immediately after entering the business, she said.

“You don’t have to know all of that on day one. You just have to pay attention to the clues and to what draws you in.”

For experienced advisors, the message is slightly different: don’t assume that something outside the traditional boundaries of the business can’t become the next stage of a career.

Advisors Sell Judgement, Not Information

Kraiger’s first job directly selling travel was with Resort Reservations in North Vancouver, a call centre selling packaged ski vacations. With no social media, Zoom presentations or sophisticated digital proposals to help close the sale, she relied on her voice and product knowledge.

It taught her a lesson about selling that she believes has become even more relevant in today’s information-saturated marketplace.

“At its best, sales isn’t about convincing someone to buy something,” she said. “It is helping them move confidently from one possibility to a decision.”

Consumers today can easily find dozens of travel itineraries of all forms, and endless social-media opinions about where they should or shouldn’t travel.

“They come to us, not just for information, but for context and judgement, and that’s where we really stand out,” Kraiger said.

After progressing through advisor and manager roles with Flight Centre, Kraiger left the travel business to spend time with her young children. She returned to Flight Centre in 2012 as a home-based independent contractor.

During her orientation, she recalled being shown the sales volumes achieved by the company’s top advisors and privately thinking she could never reach them. Her support person, Christal Bauer, thought otherwise.

“I have no doubt you’ll achieve that, too,” Kraiger recalled Bauer telling her.

That moment helped shape another of the lessons she shared at TMP Calgary: “Who believed in me? And whose career might change because I chose to believe in them?”

For suppliers, BDMs and experienced advisors in particular, she said a single introduction, FAM opportunity or expression of confidence can potentially alter someone’s career.

Building What Didn’t exist

In 2014, Kraiger brought on her first subcontractor, a newcomer to travel. More advisors followed, creating the need for training, systems and eventually a 100-page training manual she wrote herself.

At the time, building a team underneath a host agency was less common, and not everyone understood what she was trying to accomplish.

That experience led to another lesson: when the structure an advisor needs doesn’t exist, it may be worth building it.

“Sometimes it’s those ideas that once seemed unconventional that become the new way of doing business in the future.”

COVID and the Danger of Going ‘Back to Normal’

After about a year of planning, Kraiger opened the retail agency she had dreamed about on February 1, 2020. Six weeks later, COVID closed it.

Beyond the cancellations, refunds, departing team members and long days trying to bring clients home, the pandemic forced her to examine weaknesses in her own business.

“In most cases, I think that COVID didn’t cause a lot of the problems. COVID merely exposed them,” she said.

Kraiger said she spent much of the pandemic longing for the day when the industry could “go back to normal.” Her view of resilience has since changed.

“I think that resiliency is more being brave enough to not go back to the way it was before.”

That ultimately contributed to her decision to establish Expert Travel Alliance, giving her greater control over her agency’s systems, training and team development.

‘Be Willing to Be Beginners Again’

Kraiger cautioned that longevity in travel can itself present a challenge if advisors become too attached to the way they have always worked.

“Experience can be a dangerous thing in this industry, because our experience can make us excellent at yesterday’s job, but it does not automatically prepare us for tomorrow’s,” she said.

“We have to be willing to be beginners again.”

Her advice to newer advisors was not to assume there is one correct way to build a travel business. For veterans, it was to avoid confusing “this is how we’ve always done it” with “this is how it must always be done.”

Kraiger closed her presentation with five lessons from her own career: follow the clues that spark your interest; build transferable skills; remember — and pass on — the belief others have shown in you; build what you can’t find; and allow gratitude for the past to coexist with the desire to grow.

And she offered one final reframing of the question most people are asked as children.

“Maybe the better question isn’t, ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ Maybe it’s, ‘What are you willing to keep becoming?’”

“Your career is not a ticket with one destination printed on it. It’s an itinerary you’re allowed to revise.”