Terry the Travel Guy: The Power of Networking & the Rewards of Giving Back
by Bruce Parkinson
Terry Hawkins in one of his favourite places.
It would be safe to say that not very many Canadian travel advisors spent their early years in a tent in the Arctic.
But Terry Hawkins, aka Terry the Travel Guy, isn’t your average travel advisor. And not just because of his smooth cranium and foot-long goatee.
“Living up north was, I mean, to me, it’s just life, right? But other people tell me it’s a little unique,” Hawkins told Travel Market Report Canada on a Zoom call from his current base in St. Albert, northwest of Edmonton.
“When I started life we were living in a tent in the middle of the Arctic in Cambridge Bay. It was a couple of years later that my brother came along and we got solid walls. I like to say he’s spoiled.”
Hawkins’ father went north to work for the RCMP in Cambridge Bay. His mother was from the Western Arctic. A residential school survivor, she eventually got a job working with the government in Cambridge Bay, and that’s where the pair met.
After leaving the RCMP, the senior Hawkins built a business that eventually included a fuel distribution company, contracting company, hotel and industrial supply store. The family business even ran the airport. Terry graduated from the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology as a Construction Engineering Technologist in 1992, and worked for the family business until it was sold around 2000.
“The opportunity to sell a business doesn’t come along very often in the Arctic, no matter how successful it is. So when the opportunity knocked, we took it, Hawkins said.
He moved to Edmonton, where he met his wife and started a family. Sharing a wanderlust, they set off to see the world, kids in tow, including a full-year trip that took the young family “halfway around the world.” They then settled in Kelowna, where they spent nine years n.
It was in Kelowna where Hawkins began to turn his love for travel into a career. But where did that desire to see the world come from? Strangely enough, it was the cosmopolitan nature of tiny Cambridge Bay that gave him the travel bug.
Growing up in the middle of the Arctic, we were meeting people from all over the world. Believe it or not, in this place of a few hundred people, we were meeting people from Scotland, Jamaica, Japan, Vietnam, South Africa, Denmark – all over. And I always took an interest in their culture and I loved to hear their stories and imagine what these places were like. It gave me something to do when it was minus-45 and a blizzard outside. So that instilled in me the desire to travel. And fortunately, my wife had the same desire.”
Now a The Travel Agent Next Door member, Hawkins originally signed up with a different host agency when he went into business in Kelowna.
“In 2018 I joined a company that had a local office so that I could get more hands-on experience. During 2020, when everything shut down, I took the time to take a look at the support I was getting and seek greener pastures. This time I chose TTAND. I don’t think there’s anybody out there that offers the level of support that they do and encouragement that they do. And the commission splits are much better.”
Hawkins says aside from business considerations, TTAND gives him access to hundreds of professional travel advisors willing to share their expertise.
“What I love about TTAND is there’s the feeling there that you can do better with collaboration. It’s not competition, it’s collaboration.” Hawkins says the majority of travellers still don’t use advisor services, so there’s a bigger pie out there.
“Rather than trying to take a client from another travel advisor, we choose to work together to grab that segment of people who don’t use travel advisors.”
Just a year and a half ago, Hawkins moved back to Edmonton – St. Albert to be precise — for family reasons. That meant leaving his established agency in Kelowna and starting almost fresh.
Clearly, Hawkins has been successful in making himself known in his new community as he has already won two local awards. Terry The Travel Guy won the 2024 St. Albert Gazette Readers’ Choice Award for Best Travel Agency, and placed second (Gold) in the Community Votes – St. Albert Best Travel Agency category.
Hawkins attributes much of his success to networking, especially through the local chapter of Business Networking International, which bills itself as the world’s largest networking organization with 335,000 members across 11,200 Chapters in 76 countries.
He spends as much time as possible in public settings, using the St. Albert Chamber of Commerce as another networking source, and his Sandals and Beaches Resorts wrapped vehicle as an attention-getter. “It gets a lot of looks out here in the middle of winter, for sure,” he said.
Terry the Travel Guy specializes in a few niches: the Hawaiian islands, especially favourite destination Maui; the Disney parks; Universal Studios; and river and ocean cruising.
His love of Disney predates his travel advisor profession. Having travelled many times to Disney World and Disneyland, he often helped plan trips for friends and family. Hawkins also belongs to a group of Disney-loving dads called DisDads, which raises funds for Give Kids the World Village in Kissimmee. It’s a place where Make-A-Wish and 140 other charities around the world send families with critically ill children to stay free of charge when travelling to Disney World, Universal and other Orlando-area attractions.
“When you grow up in a small business, you give back to the community, and we always did. Give Kids the World Village is a very special place. Those kids are facing pretty tough challenges and so are their families. And for many of them, this is the first time that they’re going to see kids like them. And this is the first time that their families are going to see people going through the same ordeal. Seeing the change in them from the first day they get there to the last is absolutely amazing and so incredibly rewarding.”
For new travel advisors, Hawkins recommends doing lots of homework before choosing a host agency, and suggests finding a mentor or starting out as an associate in order to learn the ropes.
“There’s so much more to the business than ‘I love travel,’” Hawkins said. “There’s no clock that you punch. There are 3:00 AM phone calls saying, ‘We’re not going to make our connecting flight. What can we do?’ And I’m able to find my clients the right connections, so that they don’t miss their cruise or whatever. You’re never really off the clock, but there are many rewards in what we do.”
