The Most Valuable Access I Ever Gained Couldn’t Be Bought
How human connection shaped my career in luxury travel more than any destination ever could.
I built a career in an industry obsessed with access, but the most valuable access I ever gained came through human connection.
For more than sixteen years, my work in luxury travel has taken me around the world. I have worked behind the scenes supporting celebrities, ultra-high-net-worth individuals, and families whose travel can involve private aircraft, yachts, extraordinary hotels, multiple residences, changing schedules, and requests that sometimes seem impossible.
When people hear about my career, they often think about the places.
The hotels. The planes. The destinations. The experiences most people only see in photographs.
And I understand why. I still feel incredibly fortunate that my work has allowed me to experience so much of the world.
But when I think about what travel has actually given me, I don’t think first about any of those things.
I think about people.
The hotelier who remembers me years later.
The concierge who answers the phone when something has gone wrong.
The driver halfway across the world whom I trust completely.
The aviation partner who understands the urgency behind a call.
The local expert who says, Give me a minute. Let me see what I can do.
Money can buy extraordinary things.
It cannot manufacture a relationship at the exact moment you suddenly need one.
That kind of access comes from trust. From history. From respect. From showing up as a human being long before you need someone to solve a problem for you.
For me, travel was never just about seeing places.
It was about becoming part of them.
Everywhere my work has taken me, I have had the privilege of meeting people who became part of my professional life and, in many cases, part of my personal story. Those relationships have taught me as much about travel as any destination ever could.
They have also shaped the way I run my business today.
I founded Travel Curation around the belief that extraordinary travel is never the work of one person.
My name may be attached to the itinerary. I may be the person receiving the call when plans suddenly change. I may be responsible for putting the strategy together and making sure every moving piece ultimately works.
But I am never doing it alone.
Behind almost every seamless trip is an extraordinary ecosystem of people.
They are behind the front desk and behind the wheel. They are on airport ramps, inside kitchens, aboard aircraft, in concierge offices, and answering phones in completely different time zones. They are the people finding a solution while the traveler often has no idea a problem ever existed.
That, to me, is one of the most beautiful parts of this work.
Success in luxury travel is not about proving how much one person can carry.
It is about knowing how to bring extraordinary people together and respecting the role every one of them plays in creating the final experience.
And those relationships didn’t arrive with a job title.
I had to build them.
I also had to fight pretty hard to stay in this industry long enough to build them.
People sometimes tell me how lucky I am to have traveled the world for my career.
And I am lucky. Incredibly lucky.
But luck is only part of the story. There was a hell of a climb between where I started and the places people see me standing now.
The photographs are real. So is the privilege.
But photographs are terrible at showing the climb.
They don’t show the doors that closed, the career pivots, the moments I questioned whether there was still a place for me in this industry, or the amount of persistence it took to keep finding another way forward.
They don’t show the years of learning as I went, the risks, the uncertainty, or the moments when I had no idea what the next rung would be. I just knew I had to keep climbing.
I never want to diminish how fortunate I have been. I am profoundly grateful for the life this career has given me.
But gratitude and difficulty can exist in the same story.
This career has been beautiful.
It has also been really hard.
There was no obvious professional ladder for what I wanted to do.
I kept finding the next rung while I was already climbing.
I learned things because I needed to know them. I entered new parts of the industry and figured out how they worked. I heard no and found another door. When one version of my career stopped fitting, I created another.
Eventually, I began turning something I had historically done from inside private households, managing extraordinarily complex travel from end to end, into a service clients could engage through my own company.
There was nothing particularly glamorous about most of that process.
It was persistence.
It was curiosity.
It was asking questions.
It was being willing to start again.
It was continuing to knock on doors even when I wasn’t certain one would open.
And I certainly did not climb alone.
Some of the people who have most influenced the trajectory of my career have been women.
Some opened doors for me.
Some challenged me.
Some saw something in me before I had the résumé to fully explain it.
Some simply lived and worked boldly enough that watching them expanded what I believed was possible for my own life.
I have learned that influence does not always arrive in the form of a formal mentor.
Sometimes it is a conversation.
Sometimes it is an introduction.
Sometimes it is a woman saying, You should go for that.
Sometimes it is a woman recognizing something in you that you cannot yet see in yourself.
And sometimes it is simply having strong women around you who remind you what you are capable of when you start to doubt it.
I know how powerful that kind of support can be because there were moments in my own climb when I wasn’t entirely sure I could keep going. Having women who believed in me, encouraged me, challenged me, and sometimes saw my potential more clearly than I could helped me find the next rung.
There is extraordinary power in women helping other women keep climbing.
That is another form of access that cannot be purchased.
It is human beings opening possibilities for one another.
I still work in a world fascinated by access, and I probably always will. I love extraordinary hotels. I love aviation. I love discovering somewhere new. I love the challenge of making something complicated feel effortless.
But if you asked me today what access has mattered most over the course of my career, my answer would not be a suite, a private terminal, a yacht, or the reservation nobody else could get.
It would be the people whose phone numbers I carry from cities around the world.
The people who taught me something.
The people who trusted me.
The women who showed me another possibility.
The people who, at exactly the right moment, said:
I’ll help you figure it out.
Because after more than sixteen years in luxury travel, I have come to believe that access may open a door, but human connection is what allows you to walk through it and truly belong there.
And perhaps that is the greatest journey travel has given me.
