Toni Stewart

I have a client in the innovative automotive industry who travels frequently. These are not short, simple trips. He will fly from Miami to San Francisco, then to Taipei, Bangkok, London, and finally back home.

The client takes others under his wing and grooms them to work in his industry. This requires travel to points all over the world, including Sweden, Norway, Germany, Finland, and Russia. All of his business travel is very complex, and there are frequent changes and cancellations. My job is to stay on top of everything, so he only has to think about his work, and not worry about the details involved in getting to his airport transfer. 

I also book his leisure travel, and he has high-end tastes. When he goes on vacation, he will spend five to six figures, because he takes his play as seriously as his work. He recently made a 10-day trip to Iceland and also spent 14 days in Argentina. He visited the Indian Ocean and went diving in Seychelles. I was there to facilitate everything each time and make sure all first-class services and amenities were available to him. 

The client found me because of my Travel Agent magazine profile, which described how I dealt with a no-fly zone imposed across Europe in 2010 after a volcanic eruption in Iceland. I had ten clients from the National Hockey League stranded in Sweden, and I had to get these representatives back to the United States without using an airplane. I booked a train through Tel Aviv on a circuitous route requiring some real outside-of-the-box thinking, and I got them all home within two days.