Why I Became a Travel Agent (And What I’ve Learned Since)

The honest version of this story starts in the middle of one of the hardest seasons of my life. And why I became a travel agent is exactly where it needs to start, because it’s the reason everything else makes sense.

The Season That Changed Everything

In December 2020, I lost my longtime boyfriend. I was still grieving when, in October 2021, my son arrived at 24 weeks. If you know anything about a 24-week birth, you know that the weeks that follow are not a time when you think about much beyond survival: his, mine, and somehow holding everything together at the same time.

I went through more loss during that period than I can fully capture in one post. But those are the two moments that anchored it all.

What I can tell you is that somewhere in the middle of all of it, I had one consistent feeling: I needed to escape. Not from my son, never from him. But from the weight of everything, from grief, from fear, from the relentlessness of it. I wanted to go somewhere, anywhere, and breathe different air.

It was COVID. The world was closed. I couldn’t go anywhere.

So instead, late at night when everything was quiet and I probably should have been sleeping, I sat with that feeling and I did something with it.

Building Something at Night

By August 2022, I had my business license. Nobody handed it to me. No one mentored me through the process or told me exactly what to do. I was still grieving. I was still recovering. And I was quietly building a travel agency in the hours between my son falling asleep and the rest of the world waking up, instead of watching TV like a zombie, which had been my alternative.

I had always loved travel. It had always been the thing that made me feel most like myself. And in a season where I couldn’t go anywhere, I started learning everything I could about how to make it happen for other people. It gave me something to do with the longing. It gave me a direction when everything else felt directionless.

I didn’t announce anything right away. I just built, quietly and steadily, until I had something real to share.

Why It’s Called Grey Travel Agency

People sometimes ask about the name, expecting a story with more drama than it has.

Grey has always been my favorite color. An unusual favorite, I know. But it’s always been mine. When my son was born, I named him Greyson. And when I was building this business in those late, quiet hours, I named it Grey Travel Agency. It wasn’t a calculated branding decision. It was just the word that felt most like mine, already woven through the most important things in my life, and it fit.

Where Travel is Our Therapy

My tagline is not a marketing line. It never was.

It came from a real place, from knowing firsthand what it feels like to be desperate for escape and unable to have it. From understanding, at a bone-deep level, that travel is not a luxury for the people who need it most. It is a reset. It is perspective. It is the version of yourself that exists when you are somewhere that is not your regular life, sitting with people you love, or sometimes just yourself, and remembering that the world is bigger than whatever you’ve been carrying.

That is what travel has always been for me. That is what I want to give every single person who reaches out to this agency.

Where Travel is Our Therapy is not a tagline. It is the whole reason I am here.

Officially Out in the World: 2023

In early 2023, I announced Grey Travel Agency publicly. I had been building quietly for months, learning constantly, making mistakes privately, and refining everything I could before I put my name on it in front of people I knew.

Since then, it has been exactly what building a business from scratch looks like: slow in some seasons, full in others, constantly evolving, and always requiring more than I expected. I have learned more about the travel industry, about running a business, and about what I am actually capable of in the past few years than I ever could have anticipated.

I am still learning. I think the best travel advisors always are.

What I Know Now

I know that the hard season that pushed me to this was not wasted. I know that “Where Travel is Our Therapy” means something specific to me in a way it might not mean to someone who hasn’t needed travel the way I have. I know that the people who find their way to my business often come with their own version of that need: a family that just needs a week of joy, a couple that needs to reconnect, a group of friends that hasn’t been together in years.

I know what it feels like to need a trip and not be able to take one. That is why I take this work seriously.

And I know that my son, the one I named Greyson, the one whose name is quietly built into everything I’ve built, is the best reason I have to keep going.