Envoyage Top-Seller Julie Smigadis Found Her Voice in the Pandemic

Julie Smigadis is living her dream. 

The Toronto-based travel specialist is the founder of Travel Our World, Envoyage’s top-selling agency in Canada. She’s a member of The 1000, described as a “club for the world’s most influential travel advisors.” Last month, she attended the Envoyage Top 10 ICONS Trip in the Maldives. 

“I always have a ‘pinch me’ moment,” she told TMR.

Smigadis launched Travel Our World in 2018, after eight years of working with Flight Centre Travel Group. While she enjoyed her time on the retail side, she wanted more flexibility.

“I wanted to curate what I do authentically within myself. I really wanted to get out and travel more… I wanted to be able to cater to my clients on a luxury level as opposed to being put in a box,” she explained.   

Smigadis quickly found success as an independent and has been growing her business in the years since – even leveraging social media to stay relevant during the pandemic travel shutdown.

Today, Smigadis manages a small team of curated travel experts, chosen for their travel knowledge and niche. The Travel Our World team is strictly genuine travel lovers – including her husband Bernardo Celorio, the company’s content creator and social media manager.

“It’s always been really important for me to to be a traveller,” she said. “We only take on experienced consultants, and almost all of them are really highly travelled – like Olimpia [Govorusa] has done over 100 countries.”

It’s also important to the entrepreneur that her company’s brand is built on authentic travel experiences, including social media posts that are aspirational while still being raw and honest. She credits this authenticity, as well as adaptability, for her success.   

“This space is always changing,” she said. “The biggest takeaway from all of these years working in the travel industry is always lean into the change.”

“This is your moment to get very loud”

The COVID-19 pandemic was a stumbling block for Travel Our World. Smigadis was on track for 2020 to be a record-breaking year – but that changed when borders shut down. The setback was devastating.

“I was sort of picking myself up off the floor kind of trying to kind of get through having to cancel everything,” she recalled. “My husband said to me, ‘Julie, the whole industry is about to get very, very quiet. This is your moment to get very loud.'”

The husband-wife team shifted the company’s focus to rebranding, positioning themselves to be visible on social media as a resource for information. They offered free assistance to people who needed it, even those who had booked with another agency.

“I knew there was gonna be a resurgence. I didn’t know how long it was gonna take, but I just knew that I needed to be part of making people’s lives easier in that difficult moment, and that that would end up coming back tenfold later on. And that’s exactly what ended up happening.”

Smigadis also made the controversial decision to travel herself, going to Paris and Banff and livestreaming the experience over Zoom for industry professionals. They had approximately 200 advisors who logged in.

Their efforts paid off: 2022 was a big year. Not only did Travel Our World attract new business, but Smigadis gained the trust of other advisors, who sent clients her way.

“There were a lot of people that exited the industry,” she explained to TMR. “Being very vocal on social media and being an information source led agents to feeling comfortable handing me some of their important clients.”

Social media, and other technology, remain a key part of Smigadis’ business strategy.

“The Envoyage branding is incredible”

Travel Our World was with Independent by Flight Centre before the Envoyage launch. When asked how the rebrand impacted her business, Smigadis responded with enthusiasm.

“The Envoyage branding is incredible,” she told TMR. “The Envoyage rebrand is exactly what my business needed: An elevated approach to who we are as a brand.”

Envoyage officially launched in Canada earlier this year. The new brand, announced in February 2024, has an elegant simplicity and feels more distinct from the Flight Centre retail arm. More importantly, the change brings all of the Flight Centre independent brands under one umbrella.

As Chief Operations Officer Astrid Richardson told TMR back in June, the Envoyage rebrand was designed to unite the Flight Centre independent advisor brands around the world. “We saw an opportunity to leverage the power of our 2,000 independent advisors working under one brand, and what this would bring them in terms of consumer recognition, and supplier and partner recognition as well.”

Smigadis explained that the she has benefited from the new opportunities to network and collaborate with other Envoyage top-sellers outside of Canada. Being the country’s top-seller two years running, she’s been invited to the Enoyage ICONS retreat twice — hosted last year on a Danube river cruise and this year in the Maldives.

The ICONS rewards brings together the top 10 selling agencies from each region. It’s a chance for agency owners to celebrate their success while also networking and collaborating with like-minded peers from around the world.

“It’s that global reach of being able to bounce ideas off of each other from other parts of the world,” she explained. “Being able to come together as a community and hear different ideas… we learn so much off of each other.”