I don't sugarcoat things. It's saved my clients a lot of money and disappointment.

Marathons, half-marathons, and plenty in between. I'm not telling you that so you'll be impressed. I'm telling you because it's the clearest evidence of how I operate.

Endurance. Tenacity. Commitment. You don't finish a marathon on enthusiasm; you finish it because you decided months earlier that you would, and then you did the unglamorous work every single day. Planning a complex trip is the same job. So is building a business.

I didn't start here. I came into the travel industry in October 2015 after a career built on organization, client relationships, and solving problems other people found tedious. Turns out that's most of what this job actually is.

What travel added was the part I couldn't get anywhere else: watching someone come home genuinely different than when they left.

In June 2019, I co-founded DPP Travel with Mandy, a friend I've known most of my life. We started it because we'd both seen what the industry mostly offers: order-takers who book what you asked for.

We wanted to build the other thing. Advisors who've stood in the place you're going, who know which guide is worth the money and which hotel room actually has the view, and who charge planning fees because the planning is the product.

It took years of unpaid work before it looked like anything. Site inspections on my own dime, building real relationships with guides and ground transportation partners in destinations most agencies only read about. Early morning training runs were where I planned the growth I wanted, and where I questioned whether I could actually pull it off.

It took charging planning fees before I felt entitled to, in an industry that's only just catching up to what I knew back in 2019: the planning is worth paying for. It took learning to say no to clients who wanted the cheapest option, which is much harder than it sounds when you need the revenue. It took holding the line when people pushed back. It took getting into the Virtuoso network, which you don't buy your way into, and then earning the right to stay there.

In 2024 we hit Million-Dollar Agency status. We've held it every year since, and we continue to grow at least 25% year over year. That number isn't the point, but it's honest proof that doing this the hard way works.

The conversations always started the same way: people asking about our systems. Our automations. How we'd built things so nothing fell through the cracks.

Then the real questions came. How do I do that? What training do I actually need? If I want to scale, what has to be in place first?

They wanted to hire, but didn't know the difference between an employee and an independent contractor, or what's legally required for either. They wanted their own agency, but didn't know what that actually takes: the investment, the legal responsibilities, the financial guidelines nobody explains until you're already in over your head.

They also kept running into the same gap from the other direction. There was no real introductory program for the travel industry, nothing that explained how the business actually worked, or the different job options inside it. They didn't know their rights in each role, or what expectations came with running their own business. Nobody was teaching them about industry events, familiarization trips, or the practical parts of the job that just don't show up in a Google search.

So in November of 2024, we built Travel Pro Pathways to answer those specific problems my partner and I faced, working side by side on the curriculum and the community. No fluff, no hype about six figures in ninety days. Just the foundational training we wished existed when we started, expanded constantly to fill the gaps agents and agency owners keep bringing to us.