From Banking to the Bridge: How HAL’s Aaron Crawford Found His Calling in Travel

Aaron Crawford didn’t grow up knowing he’d build a career in travel. In fact, for years, his professional life looked very different.

Before joining Holland America Line as BDM ON, MB, QC and Atlantic Canada, Crawford spent much of his early career in Canadian banking and finance, working with Canada Trust, TD Canada Trust, and RBC. The roles were stable and respectable; but they never quite fit.

“I was genuinely unhappy in the work,” he admits. “I loved travel, but I had no idea what a career in travel actually looked like. At the time, the only job I could even picture was being a flight attendant.”

The spark that changed everything came not in a boardroom, but on a city bus in Mexico.

While travelling with friends from Puerto Vallarta to Sayulita, Crawford found himself casually answering questions from other passengers about the area, the culture, and what they were seeing along the way. Before he realized it, he had become the unofficial tour guide.

“My friends turned to me and said, ‘This is what you should be doing,’” he recalls. “At the time, I laughed it off. I thought, I’m not becoming a tour guide in Mexico making a dollar a day.”

But the idea stuck.

Slowly, and organically, Crawford began making room for travel in a very real way. He picked up a part-time role with WestJet, working at the airport in both Vancouver and Toronto, an experience that immersed him in the operational side of the industry and confirmed that he was on the right path.

From there, he took his first steps into cruising, joining Royal Caribbean and Celebrity Cruises as a port and shopping guide; a decision that led to two to three years at sea.

“I’m a cruiser at heart,” he says. “It’s always been my preferred way to travel.”

Eventually, the call to return to land led him to Air Canada Vacations, where he joined the business development team supporting Southwestern Ontario. It was there that the moment of full-circle clarity arrived.

Hosting a familiarization trip in Puerto Vallarta — the very destination where his travel career had unknowingly begun — Crawford found himself once again on a bus, this time sharing the destination with Canadian travel advisors.

“I had to stop mid-sentence,” he says. “I got goosebumps. I thought, this is it. This is that full-circle moment. I knew my friend had been right all along — this is exactly where I’m supposed to be.”

Crawford’s passion for travel runs deeper than cruise ships and FAMs. During a gap year between high school and university, he participated in the Canadian government’s Crossroads International program, which placed young Canadians in volunteer roles overseas. His assignment took him to South India, where he lived and worked within the local community, teaching geography and immersing himself fully in a culture vastly different from his own.

“To say it changed my life would be an understatement,” he says. “It gave me an awareness of how big the world is — and how small it is at the same time. How much we all have in common. And how privileged I am.”

Those early experiences of pushing beyond comfort zones, embracing difference, and immersion, continue to shape how he approaches his role today.

Crawford celebrated two years with Holland America Line just last week and credits the support and culture of the cruise industry, including mentors like former Holland America BDM Lori Patterson, for reinforcing his thinking that ours is an industry unlike any other.

“It’s rare to find an industry where competitors genuinely support one another,” he says. “We all want people to keep travelling. We want people to keep cruising.”

That philosophy extends to his deep respect for Canadian travel advisors, whom he calls essential to the success of both the cruise industry and travel as a whole.

“We wouldn’t be here without them,” Crawford says. “They’re our advocates, our brand ambassadors, and the ones guiding travellers toward experiences that can truly change how they see the world.”