Dreamer2

Besides being a travel agent - or going to the occasional business meetings in Topeka - which jobs out there have interesting travel requirements?
I'm wondering about hotel management, sales distributors, journalists, antique or retail buyers... Anybody care to share stories or experiences?

travleis

Most of the sales jobs and networking positions which require a lot of travel won't make most people enjoy travel more. In fact, the opposite.
Time pressures are a big negative, the hotels start to all look the same, etc.
There's a huge difference between leisure travel and work-related travel as far as enjoyment potential goes.

That said, if you are in higher level management at a large company you can sometimes get enough budgetary freedom to make the business travel more of a pleasure. The best suites at the best hotels, extra days for personal time at destination cities, etc.
But only a small fraction of travel intensive jobs will include these kind of perks.

Exceptions would include esoteric jobs like being a travel photographer or documentary filmmaker, overseas travel tour guide, small businesses like antique dealerships can involve leisurely paced business trips to Europe and such which are written off.

GoTravel

Tons of travel in the hotel business. I was the Director of Sales and Marketing for a resort for about 10 years. My travel was all over the globe attending conferences. Europe, US, Caribbean, Mexico, Canada.

Check into Group Sales Manager positions.

GoTravel

Also, travleis is correct that when you travel that much for work, it becomes a chore.

I have woken up in hotel rooms many times and had no idea what city or country I was in.

You think air travel is a pain in the ass now? Try having to do it on a regular basis for a living.

I never unpacked. I kept doubles of all my tolietries and make-up; one set for my house and one set stayed permenantly packed.

All my clothes I bought were black. Black so that I could match everything and go out of town for a week and not have to check luggage.

I've eaten chicken served so many ways at luncheons I will not eat it any longer.

The upside? Zillions of frequent flyer miles and hotel room points. I've gotten to stay at hotels I would never be able to afford on my own. However, I don't care to really ever get on a plane for a long time. It really wears you out.

Good luck and for more info, go to MPI.org (meeting planners international).

mdv

My cousin works for the US Postal Service (retirement counselor and advisor)--he travels all over the United States .

Statia

I travel as an international buyer for a retail store. I agree that traveling for your job becomes more of a chore than an enjoyment. However, I usually try and manage to fit in one evening of free time/enjoyment in the city I'm visiting.

gail

My husband is a management consultant. He travels all the time. With apologies to people who live in these cities - in the last few months he has had the privilege of going to Cleveland, Columbus, Buffalo, Grand Rapids. He is going to San Francisco next month, but will see little except the airport, a cab, and an office building.

Mommar

You almost can't predict some of the ways travel opportunities present in career selection. A good friend is an environmentalist. She travels the globe over, invited and paid for by UN organizations, eco-tourism companies, educational groups, you name it. Some is a little less "luxurious" with a greater emphasis on seeing the unspoiled wilderness, etc. But you can't imagine the wonderful places she goes, the interesting people she has access to. And she got her start organizing local Earth Day events!

BAK

I've travelled a lot, on business, in three different jobs, mostly in Canada.

I used to be a regional executive of a big company, responsible for some aspects of management in our plants in three provinces and our sales offices in four. For a year and nineteen days i held a westrn job and a central job concurrently, and I'd just figure out which of half a dozen cities i wanted to spend the weekend in, and plan my trips accordingly.

This company also had me responsible for some Carribbean operations, so I was in Trinidad a lot, and sometimes in Bermuda, Barbados and The Bahamas.

And in my early days at this company, I was based in a city other than our headquarters, so was in the headquarters city once a month for a year.

In another company, I was the head of a small department responsible for working with governments across the country, so I got to travel to all the provincial capitals at least once a year.

The best travel, perhaps, came after I started my own consulting firm. My major client had offices in 10 cities, and had to visit each several times a year,usually related to some cutomer-oriented event that involved nice hotels and fine meals.

Part of my business is photography, and i've travelled to the nicest parts of lots of places taking picutres for my clients, in Canda, the USA, and Europe.

Travel for journalists is often unpleasant; they are either sent to places with a lot of conflict, or theyhave to listen to boring speeches and then spend time writing stores and sending them back, instead of enjoying themselves.

For a young person planning a career -- look for a company with many branches, in lots of countries, that does something mostly in cities (it's not a lot of fun to visit oil fields in deserts in the winter). Get well educated, so that you are a senior person entitled to decent hotels and high enough up in the ranks that you get to entertain clients in good restaurants. Plan meetings for Fridays and Mondays, so that you get to spend the weekend, on expenses, in the destination city.

BAK

Maureen04

My husband is an exec. for a international manufacturing company and travels constantly overseas. Yes, he has many ff miles but most companies nowadays send you far for a meeting or two, then you're back on a plane. My husband went to Korea 2 weeks ago for just one day, came home for 1 1/2 days then has been gone for 2 weeks to Italy and France. Companies expect you to work from 7am to midnight and there is no time to see the area. Most executives plan it this way so they are home sooner to see their families. Travel especially with the so-called new security is a TOTAL hassle. Unfortunately the people who are doing the travel in companies are not the young ones starting out but the older more exp. ones who don't want it because of their families.

Anonymous

The best travel-related job I ever had was working as a consultant for the company that did outside evaluations of the US School Lunch Program for the USDA. (When you read in the paper, "A study found that the average school lunch is 38 percent fat," I did that study.)

I would have to be at the schools from 7 AM til 2 PM, and the rest of the day was mine to spend as I wished as long as I did an hour or two of paperwork before the next day. Since I live on the east coast and am a morning person anyway, those hours were no hardship -- 7 AM in California felt like 10 AM to me!

The downside was that the locations were chosen literally at random. More than once, I was greeted by name when I arrived at a hotel because I was their only guest for the night, traveling in a touristy area in the off-season. Or I would have to stay 20 miles away from the town I was studying, since that was the nearest hotel.

The up side, in addition to all the free time, was that I got to see parts of the US that nobody else ever would. In getting to spend the days with lunch ladies I got to know some locals pretty well, and got the inside scoop on the local community, from which restaurants had good local home cooking, to really weird and quirky local attractions, to which teacher was seeing the principal on weekends.

ChristieP

As a former college recruiter, I traveled a LOT! Unfortunately, the destinations were less-than-glamourous: College Station, Lubbock, and Austin, Texas. Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Fayetteville, Arkansas. But yes, I did accumulate a lot of frequent flyer miles and hotel points, and occasionally, the college town had a good restaurant!

swalter518

Dreamer, I think the best job for travel is the one with the most vacation time. Work travel is no fun if you do it more than once a month and it usually takes you to someplace like Springfield, IL.

simpsonc510

I'm a full-time teacher (which doesn't pay as well as a lot of other jobs listed here) but the summer vacation, as well as spring and Christmas breaks, have been great for traveling. My husband and I own our own business and we get to travel frequently to trade shows in Europe and all around the US. Being our own boss allows us to visit a lot of interesting places and we've met some very interesting people. Our life together has certainly been exciting in our nearly 40 years of marriage!

Ryn2691

Software training. My company has about 30 trainers, they spend about 75% of their time on the road. The mix of where tends to be pretty good, though you go to Podunk as often as you go to S. California or NY.

The products we sell mostly go to universities and city govts. The upside of that is that their budgets are very tight, so the company usually suggests to them that they allow extra per diem cash if you will agree to stay over Saturday night to lower the airfare. When we stay over, we are granted half of the airfare difference for mad money, and we are not required to make up the difference in work hours. (Say you're training M-Th; you get to play Fri & Sat, but get paid for a 40-hr. week anyway. Civil servants very seldom work late, so the sessions tend to end at 4 pm. sharp.)

Mommar

It's so hard to predict. My old job with a big personal care products company theoretically had lots of travel but we kept missing our numbers and cutting travel back to just the VP level. Now I work for a company doing much better and I used to travel several times a year for press tours where we'd work 5 hours in back to back meetings, then go to fancy dinners, stay in posh hotels, sometimes go to shows in NYC and use car service everywhere. In my current role, I travel domestically once a week (for the day) and internationally 1-2 times each quarter. Always 4 star and business, if not first class, the whole way. I'm now in a senior managerial role, though I used to be in product marketing. My only complaint (?) is that I'm often alone on the road and I do miss my family. Still, it's hard to really complain from a fancy hotel with room service.

X_Bellman

I have many friends in various postions who travel coast to coast. They all seam to have the same opinion-Its fun at first then it becomes a real pain in the a**. I have one friend who just gave up a $125,000 a year job because he got fed up with flying out every monday morning. He now makes about half as much and is enjoying life better than ever.

gail

Another thought - go to nursing school and sign on (after some experience) as a travel nurse - you get sent places for 6 or more weeks and actually live in the area.

GoTravel

Mommr, no offense but I've stayed at some of the nicest hotels in the world and ordered room service. It was very easy to complain that I'd rather be home.

As an earlier post stated, after a while, all hotel rooms look the same.

uuhhhh

there are a couple of folks on the food network with jobs i'd like: Rachael Ray (sp?), the tall skinny guy from NYC who runs around the globe eating, Mario Bataglia, and a couple others.

or why not travel writing for Conde Nast, Travel & Leisure, Islands, or the like.