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Culture

What are the Different Types of Travel Jobs?

By Susan Grindstaff
Updated Feb 17, 2024
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Many individuals and businesses spend time and money on travel, both for enjoyment and to conduct business. Many travel jobs can be found in the tourism industry or catering to business travelers. Travel jobs related to tourism include travel agents, tour guides, and tour group leaders. Many corporations and businesses hire travel agencies to arrange their trips, both domestic and abroad. Some of the larger businesses even hire full-time travel consultants to manage travel and travel expenses.

Tour guides usually work for larger companies who arrange tours for groups of individuals. Sometimes these tours are domestic, but they are often arranged abroad. Tours are often expensive to arrange, so in many cases clubs and social groups may decide to book an entire tour exclusively for their group. This cuts down on individual costs and ensures that they will be traveling with friends. Other than tour guides, travel jobs associated with tours include bus drivers and tour group leaders.

Many travel jobs are available within the cruise line industry. In addition to employees who actually run and manage the ship, cruise lines hire people for food service, entertainment, and custodial work. Cruise lines also need people to work as recreation managers. These employees arrange activities for the passengers while the ship is at sea. Ideally, people who work as recreation managers should be physically fit and capable of performing a wide range of activities.

More common travel jobs can be found in various fields of transportation. This includes airline pilots, flight attendants, and reservationists. Those who work with cross country bus lines and rail systems are also a part of the travel industry. This is particularly true in Europe, where rail systems stretch across many different countries.

Travel agencies are companies that specialize in arranging both business travel and vacations. A travel agent is typically up to date on the best prices for airline tickets and hotel accommodations. Many resorts offer vacation packages exclusively to travel agencies. These agencies then resell the packages to their customers. Travel agents should ideally be energetic people who enjoy working with the public.

Some people make their living writing articles and books about travel. These writers sometimes find employment with newspapers or magazines for work in their travel and leisure sections. Other travel writers may write complete travel guides, which are booklets devoted to specific destinations. A travel guide will typically include reviews on area restaurants and hotels, and listings of interesting places to visit.

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Discussion Comments

By lluviaporos — On Sep 17, 2014

@Mor - It does depend on the job. Flight attendants are quite well paid, although they do work very long hours. It's difficult to get around that when you're on a long flight though.

And travel agent jobs will usually come with quite a few traveling perks and they can be very well paid as well.

I think it's always difficult to get a decent gig that involves the service industry. If you're really hoping to get good work that includes travel, you have to aim for a more skilled position.

By Mor — On Sep 16, 2014

@KoiwiGal - It depends on which cruiseline you work for to some extent. If someone was interested in that kind of job I'd just ask around a lot to see what might suit. There are plenty of people with experience who are willing to talk.

I will say, though, that there's a reason most of the wait staff in a cruise ship tend to be from countries where the exchange rate with US dollars is good. To them, the tips are more valuable.

Most travel jobs tend to be fairly hard work and low pay though, because they are so much in demand.

By KoiwiGal — On Sep 16, 2014

Unless you have a specialist skill, like being a nurse, or an engineer, you won't make much money working on a cruise line and it's not as much fun as it sounds. You're essentially working at a very low wage and dependent on tips, and a lot of the people vacationing on the ship won't come from tipping cultures.

The job usually consists of very long hours, with very few days off, so it's not like you'll always be able to go ashore (especially since most cruise ships don't spend more than one or two nights at each port). Usually you'll be assigned to a single ship that just does the same route over and over as well, so if it's cruising in a small circle around the Caribbean that isn't going to be much of an adventure.

The advantage is that your accommodation and food is covered, and you'll meet a variety of people, but as traveling jobs go it's not a particularly good one.

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