Booked Everyone Else Their Dream Trip, Never Took My Own Leave

The irony of my old job still makes me laugh a little bitterly, so let me just get it out of the way up front: I spent two years planning other people's honeymoons, family reunions, bucket-list trips to places I'd never been, while my own approved leave requests sat in a folder gathering digital dust because "peak season" apparently lasts eleven months of the year.

I worked as a travel consultant at a small agency, mostly handling custom itineraries for clients who wanted something more curated than what the big booking sites spit out. The actual craft of it I genuinely loved, there's something satisfying about building someone a perfect week, and getting a photo from a client saying "this was perfect" hit different every single time.

The problem was the agency ran lean, four of us total, and every single one of us was booked solid enough that taking leave meant your clients got dumped on a coworker who was already drowning, so unofficially nobody ever really took their full leave. I carried something like eighteen unused days by the time I left, which the agency happily paid out in cash instead of letting me use them like an actual human with a life outside a spreadsheet of other people's flight numbers.

Client calls were also a special kind of exhausting because travel makes people either their best or their absolute worst selves, no in-between. I had a client scream at me because their flight got delayed, as if I personally control weather systems, and then not even apologize once they landed safely and had a great trip, which I only know because they left a five star review that didn't mention the screaming at all. Make it make sense.

I left mostly for the burnout of it, the compounding exhaustion of never fully switching off because clients would message at odd hours about their trips in progress, and the honestly funny realization that I, a professional trip planner, had not personally left the country in over two years. I quit, took a proper month off using the payout, and went somewhere warm by myself, which felt like the most on-brand act of petty revenge I've ever committed against a job.

Would I recommend it. Yes, actually, despite the tone of this post. The actual work is genuinely fun if you like people and puzzles, the pay was fair for the industry, and I learned skills I use everywhere now, negotiation, patience, reading people fast. Just negotiate your leave policy hard before you sign, harder than I did, because "we'll figure it out" is not a policy, it's a trap with good branding.