From Ground Zero to Stranded in Newfoundland: 25 Years Later, Travel Advisors Remember 9/11

On the day the Twin Towers collapsed, Dennis Post recalls, he was a reservist with the U.S. Coast Guard Port Security in St. Petersburg, FL.  

“My entire unit of 130+ members was immediately deployed, to New York City and then to Boston, due to the additional threats in that area. Our mission was to patrol the ports and keep people safe around our nation.” 

For weeks, he recalls, “We didn’t know how to navigate this New World we were living in. People didn’t want a cruise, didn’t want to get back on airplanes, didn’t want to go to big cities. Of course 9/11 impacted lives, families, and businesses across the nation and other parts of the world. But the travel business was impacted immediately to the point of nearly stopping for months on end until people felt safe to go again.” 

Eventually Dennis and his wife Amy, who has dabbled in selling travel since high school, started their own agency; today Post Card Travel Planning sells over $2 million worth of trips a year.  

But while “God has blessed us in our travel business as it continued to grow and grow, the memories linger of 9/11. Our thoughts and prayers go out to all the families and loved ones that were impacted across the country, and all the men and women in the fire, police and military, who responded and who continuously are impacted by those tragic days.” 

Across the travel industry, advisors this week are thinking back to where they were and the memories seared in their minds of the day the world changed so much.   

Soldiers in the Caribbean 

In the Caribbean Sea that day, Susan Berman was a part-time travel agent (and not yet “a travel advisor” or owner of Berman Travel). When she stepped out onto her balcony on Carnival Destiny after breakfast, she was taken aback to see all the lifeboats had been lowered into the water, and the dock in Antigua was full of military personnel in fatigues—and carrying machine guns.  

“The world changed immediately in that instant,” she says. “Here we were floating around at sea not knowing anything, and lot of passengers were from New York. We met in the theater and the captain and the cruise director came out to calm us down. I remember the show onboard had a New York theme and the set had a New York skyline. It was this weird, bizarre thing seeing it.  

“It was very scary. But they did let us get off at all the ports, though it was all new to everyone. All of a sudden there were metal detectors, everyone was searched, the lines coming back into the ship from each port were so long. But I was really very impressed with how Carnival handled it. They were really good about communicating with us, and they allowed us free calls home to check on everybody.” 

Back in Puerto Rico a week later there still were no flights home, so Carnival put everyone up for three nights at the Marriott. And as they finally boarded the flight home, there were huge bins into which they were ordered to throw anything that could conceivable be considered a threat. “They were taking people’s nail clippers, all the little stuff we were used to carrying. You just knew something changed, something shifted. We actually saw it occur immediately, before our eyes,” Berman says. 

Undeterred, Berman opened officially opened her own agency the following April Fools Day. “So many people told me not to do it. But here I am 25 years later, still plugging away, with ICs all over the country,” she says with a smile. “Life is short. Nothing matters except for your people.” 

Jill Koch, owner of the storefront agency Adventures in Travel, was on a Royal Caribbean cruise in St. Thomas with her husband and seven-month-old daughter when a cab driver told her about the first plane. “Needless to say it was not fun when I got back. We held a lot of hands and cancelled a lot of trips because people were scared. But I was really glad I could tell customers I had flown safely. We had a bus trip to New York that was paid in full with 45 local people set to travel in October—and in the end most still went, as we told them it would be a big help to New York tourism.” 

In Newfoundland, Brussels, Dallas 

Christina Ernst of VIP Alpine Tours, along with six of the 36 members of her group tour to Munich, were “somewhere over the Atlantic when we knew something terrible had happened,” she recalls. “We really had no idea what was going on—but the pilot was unusually quiet, and we were diverted to St. John’s, Newfoundland, where we ended up spending five nights in the basement of a Salvation Army church.” 

Living the story that inspired the hit Broadway musical Come from Away, Ernst “will never forget the people of St. John’s. They opened their hearts to all of us, went out of their way to help complete strangers, and made an unimaginable situation a little easier. I’m still incredibly grateful to them, and I try to repay that kindness whenever I can. It’s one of those experiences I will carry with me forever.” 

Teresa Hildebrand was at the annual AAA Travel conference in Brussels, Belgium, with AAA Travel executives and key suppliers when the first plane hit, at 3pm local time. The American Embassy immediately sent over security, removed all signage having to do with AAA, and sequestered everyone on the top floors of the hotel that first day.  

By the next day, the group had come up with a contingency plan:  “everyone agreed to pivot travel products for the near term to ‘close to home,’ family gatherings and generational travel.” When flights resumed four days later, Hildebrand was on one of the first to land in Atlanta. “Air traffic controllers were waving to us from the tower, Delta employees gave us US flags as we deplaned, and custom officers gave us candy kisses as we came through arrivals.” 

Gregg Welpe, meanwhile, saw the second plane hit on a TV monitor on the 54th floor of Renassaince Tower in Dallas, where he worked for the inhouse agency for a local law firm. They frantically worked to “try to get employees back to Dallas by any means possible from NY, DC, and all points beyond” until early afternoon, when the city of Dallas evacuated the city’s 10 tallest skyscrapers.  

“We rode the elevators down and the trains home in an eerie silence—and later found out that former clients that were in the North Tower for a merger with Alberto VO5, and barely made it out alive. 9/11 is a day we all will never forget—nor the days that followed. People came together to find a way to get everyone home. They picked up strangers and dropped them off in their hometowns on the long drive back to Dallas.  

“That’s the silver lining that I see from that terrible day. We united as a nation.” 

In upstate Rochester, NY, Dillon Guyer was in fourth grade when a secretary brought Mr. Chindbloom a note written on green paper. He recalls the TV playing in the teachers’ lounge, and Mr C. saying “there’s nothing here in Rochester to worry about…you are fine here.” 

But when he flew to Chicago the following week, “it was shoes off. New security lines. New feelings. The world was changed.” 

Hit Hard in the New York

But of course the closer you were to the Twin Towers, the more likely that your life changed forever.  

Marni Becker arrived at her office at Protravel International to find “the conference room was packed with people in shock, crying and saying names of people (clients, etc..) in the towers. I will never forget the quiet of the streets, seeing people crowded around the TV at bars, people running frantically on the streets, seeing police cars covered in ash as well as the military cars going down the West Side Highway and the crowd waiting to board ferries back to New Jersey. The people who escaped downtown covered in ash were led away by people dressed in hazmat suits. I was able to take a train to a town that a family member met me at to drive me home.” 

Allison Amini of Novel World Travel was a software engineer across the street from the Twin Towers when the planes hit the building and ran for my life. “The whole experience was life-changing, and a contributing factor to my eventual career change into travel,” she says. “It made me realize life is short, that it can end at any moment, and that I should pursue my passions and travel.” 

Toni Day, meanwhile, spent more than 25 years with the New York City Fire Department, rising to the rank of EMS Deputy Chief, before moving into travel. She often has credited her experiences following the September 11th attacks, when she was stationed at Ground Zero, as the inspiration behind her commitment to community, resilience, and compassion—and a motivation to start Toni Tours, Inc., in 2004, and become a mentor to many travel advisors and a member of the ASTA boards on the local and national levels.  

When she was named godmother of the Emerald Astra this past October, Scenic Group USA/Latam president Ken Muskat cited her service in those bleak weeks and months. “Toni embodies the passion, dedication and resilience that define the very best of the travel industry,” he said. “Her service as a first responder and her leadership as a travel advisor have touched countless lives.” 

And interestingly, many travel advisors recalled not just the smoke and the ash—but the feeling of coming together that national tragedy wrought.  

“While I would never wish for something like that to happen again, I do wish Americans could remember what we were like when we were still able to come together in the face of adversity and work to create a more balanced existence for all our citizens,” says Phillip Archer at Roaming Richly Travel. “9/11 gave us perspective of what is truly important.”