Her Story
About Sarah
Sarah Benoit is a tourism marketing professional, educator, and digital marketing entrepreneur with more than 20 years of experience. She currently serves as Lead Instructor at Learn Tourism, a role she has held for just under two years. In this position, she works as an instructional designer, national public speaker, and teacher, collaborating with a wide variety of destinations across the United States to educate tourism, hospitality, and travel professionals on subjects related to marketing and technology, with a focus on building training programs and online learning initiatives. Prior to this, Sarah owned a search engine optimization and social media marketing company for 23 years, starting in 2003. During that time, she combined forces with one of her largest competitors and opened a training company, gradually building out the educational component of her work. In 2024, following Hurricane Helene, she transitioned fully into education by merging with Learn Tourism after her business partner stepped away. Sarah is completely self-taught in digital marketing and attributes her effectiveness as a teacher to this hands-on experience. She has a personal passion for travel and tourism, living in Asheville, North Carolina, and finds the alignment of her professional and personal interests deeply fulfilling. She has also embraced the shift from for-profit to nonprofit work, expanding her expertise into mission-based approaches. Her career goals include continuous learning, uplifting rural American businesses and communities through education, and leading conversations on AI and the ethics of AI, having taught the subject since 2012. She emphasizes that human-centered industries like travel and tourism, along with the arts, should guide AI's role in communities rather than leaving decisions solely to technologists or distant policymakers.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Sarah
01What do you attribute your success to?
I would say that I'm a self-proclaimed extrovert who scares other extroverts. I'm a big people person. I have a lot of wonderful people in my life. My professional connections are my personal connections. The people that supported my business over the course of two decades, from the time I started it till the time it closed, those people, I genuinely love them. They have genuinely shown up for me. We have lived through the pandemic together. We have lived through a hurricane that wiped out one of the most beautiful parts of our city together. I think, for me, it has really been the support systems that I've created and the real relationships that I've built. That's been a huge part of my focus. When I first started my very first company in 2003, I just wasn't willing to sacrifice long-term relationship benefit for short-term gain, financially. We've had the 2008 crash. My company made it through that because of the relationships I built. The pandemic, we made it through that because of the relationships that I built. Then we have a hurricane, it's the same thing. Those people on a personal and professional level, they are the real reason that when the last major career shift happened for me, a little over 18 months ago, that I didn't break under that pressure.
02What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
I think when it comes to technology, you have to learn about the technology. Understanding that it exists does not dictate your values and principles around it. I think we need to clarify that with people. You can have whatever opinions and develop those opinions that you want to have that are really true and authentic to us. And also, we keep our awareness of what's happening with technology and how it's going to impact different things. That curiosity and that awareness has to be fed, and again, to see yourself as somebody who can contribute to the conversation. The technology thing is going to require that you have a mindset of learning. And you have a mindset of being curious about it. And knowing that you won't figure it out in one week. It's a continuing conversation as waves of impact occur. We all just really have to be innovative and creative, and instead of living in a space of fear about what our place is now, to be open that our place is changing, that our contributions to the world will change.
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