Becoming an Agent at the Age of 40: Meet Linda Pagano
by Cheryl RosenLinda Pagano’s career as a travel agent began in the supermarket when she was 40 years old.
Until then, she and her husband Larry had owned a restaurant. Larry worked there 10 hours a day, and Linda raised the children and helped out. But with her children grown, she was looking for something useful to do. And there on the bulletin board, as she checked out her groceries, was a “help wanted” sign from a local travel agency. Linda went home, changed her clothes, came back, and applied on the spot.
“I just walked in off the street and said, ‘I’d like to apply for the job,’” she said. “When they asked what experience I had, I said, ‘None, but I’ve traveled a lot and I really would like to do this. I promise to work hard, to do whatever you need, and not to take your clients one day when I leave.’“
The owner said she would think it over, but the next day she called and offered Linda a job greeting customers as they walked in the door.
After a couple of years, in 2008, Linda decided to open her own agency. She found a corporate agency in nearby Moorestown, NJ, whose owner was ready to retire, and bought it. But things were not to be that easy; within a couple of months, the airlines instituted commission cuts, the economy faltered, and corporate travel came screeching to a halt.
In the meantime, though, Linda had been seeing a surprising number of walk-in leisure clients in her storefront office. “It’s an affluent community, and people there like to do business in their own town,” she said.
For a while, Larry kept working in the restaurant and Linda “worked her tail off” at the agency. She never went to a travel school (“I don’t think that’s the way to learn the business”), but credits being a people person with keeping the agency in the black during the first hard months.
“You can’t push things at people that don’t fit them; you have to spend some time to get to know what they really need,” she said. “A client will say, ‘I want to go to Aruba because my friend went there and she loved it,’ and I’ll say, ‘Well yes, but, what do you love to do?”
Finding her niche
In the end, Linda says, it was finding a lucrative and recurring niche that made her agency a success (though one could argue that a few smart business decisions helped). As fate would have it, one of her clients lived in an over-55 community whose residents took an annual trip. A Trip Committee was charged with choosing where they would go each year, with a formal RFP process that required three bids. The first year Linda bid for the business the committee already had decided to go to Ireland.
Eager to get in, “I asked Larry if we should cut our margins and we decided to do it,” Pagano says. After 52 people signed up, the Paganos decided to pay their own way to be with the group and make sure the trip went smoothly.
“After the first year the committee said, ‘The heck with the bidding, if Linda and Larry go with us we’ll just use them every year.’ And through that piece of that business we got into other over-55 communities,” Pagano said. “Larry calls this my 80-hour-a-week hobby. He said whatever money I made in travel we could spend on our own travel, and when he sold his restaurant we could go wherever I wanted.”
So is she happy to be in the travel business instead of the restaurant business? Of course, she said, or at least most of the time.
“The biggest frustration is that when things go wrong it’s out of your control. In a restaurant you can fix things yourself, but in travel when something goes wrong you can’t do anything about it.”
But that’s just a minor inconvenience. “On our honeymoon Larry and I went to the Poconos,” she says. “And here we are now—we’ve been everywhere.”
