by Jim Bellomo | Dec 25, 2018 | Uncategorized
Meet Jason and Seth in one of their favorite places, on a trip.
So a couple of days ago I gave you the first half of how we wound up in the travel business…this fast. As I mentioned in my first “How did this happen” post, we were just going to start training last January and Kathleen might get into the actual business in March or April and I would follow when my time with my other business was over in two or three or more years. But a year ago, on Christmas Eve (2017), we met two of our favorite people for breakfast at my favorite breakfast place, Lola in downtown Seattle.
First let me introduce these two guys—Seth and Jason. We first met Seth on Twitter about six years ago when he moved from Eugene to Seattle to become the morning weather person on KOMO television news. From the start he would talk about cruising and traveling on the air so we started following each other on Twitter and then he followed us and we began a dialogue that led to a friendship. In the morning when I would ride my exercise bike, Seth and I would text back and forth with Seth about cruising and travel because I might have been the only person texting him at 4:30 am. We had never met but we were becoming friends.
In November 2014 we (Kathleen and I) went on our second Panama Canal cruise with our buddies the Martini Mates. When we arrived in our stateroom on Celebrity’s Infinity in Fort Lauderdale we found two bottles of wine. One was from our travel agent at the time (the amazing Norma Jean) and the other was from Seth. He had tracked us down, ordered wine and had it delivered to us…and we had never even met him. What a guy.
When we returned from the Canal we thanked him and told him that we just had to meet sometime. About six months (and a lot texting and Twitter) later he asked us if we wanted to join him and his husband Jason for lunch on a Holland America cruise ship while it was in port for a media day. We jumped at the chance as we would finally be able to meet him and talk in person. Since then we have met up with Seth and Jason a whole bunch of times, they have been to our place, we have been to theirs and we have become friends.
Which brings us to last Christmas Eve. We had told the guys that we had a surprise to tell them about when we met. You see the biggest thing that Seth and I have in common is that we both LOVE to plan travel. We will literally both grab computers after dinner and price airfare just for fun (seriously…much to Kathleen and Jason’s exasperation). When we met, that morning we told them we were going to be travel agents/consultants with Expedia.
They were thrilled for us and Seth asked me a kind of a strange question. He asked, “Will you be doing group travel?” I told him, “I guess we will. We haven’t really started yet.” That was the extent of it. We spent the rest of breakfast just talking about travel and stuff as we always do.
Then about 10 days later, Seth called me and asked if now that we had started our training, if we would be willing to help him plan and book a cruise for some friends to celebrate his 40th birthday in September 2018. He figured that we might end up with 20 or 25 people on a three-day Royal Caribbean cruise on Explorer of the Seas. First, I was beyond gratified that Seth would trust us with this. He has never been a huge fan of travel agents. His feeling was (and I can verify that it is the truth) that he knew more than they did about travel and cruising. Second, I was scared to death that we might screw it up. I had booked a bunch of cruises over the years but just for us. And I had never done a group. And we had done about three hours of training at that point. YIKES! But we said yes. How hard could it be? One of those situations where we didn’t know what we didn’t know.
The first thing I learned was…we couldn’t do it half way. We couldn’t book a group cruise with Kathleen starting in March or April or with me starting in 2021. We had to go all in right then. We really had no choice but to go all-in in when Seth invited more than 80 people thinking he would get 20-30 people and we wound up sailing in September with 62. If I do say so myself, the cruise was a HUGE success. There will be more about this cruise in future posts but for now, I just need to thank Seth and Jason for putting their faith in us. And for being our great friends.
Lastly, MERRY CHRISTMAS!
“There is nothing on this earth more to be prized than true friendship.” —Thomas Aquinas
by Jim Bellomo | Dec 23, 2018 | Uncategorized
I want to wait until tomorrow to finish my story about how we got into the travel business. Today I want to talk about gifts. Pretty appropriate since tomorrow is Christmas Eve and the next day Christmas.
About 15 years ago I stopped giving our children things for Christmas. For those of you who don’t know, we have three between us. Kathleen has a daughter (Michelle) who is married to Brian. I have a son (Josh) who is married to Cynthia and a daughter (Jenna) who is married to Joel. At the time I stopped giving presents, there were no grandchildren in the picture. Instead of things, I give them experiences.
In the beginning (before grandchildren) I would take all six of them out to do something together. This in itself was a pretty difficult thing to do when coordinating all their schedules. On Christmas morning they would open a box and inside it would tell them what we were doing that year. In the early years it was usually a play or show of some kind. For instance we saw touring companies of Lion King, Phantom of the Opera and The Blue Man Group along with some traveling Cirque de Soleil shows. Then along came our grandson and Jenna and Joel moved across the mountains to the Wenatchee area and they started getting experiences of their own without all of us. I kept giving them experiences but pretty much stuff they could do by themselves like dinners out, overnight hotels stays, airfare to Hawaii, etc.
But I kept giving the other four kids who lived near us (I call them kids but they range in age from 40 to 38) experiences here with us. We’ve done cooking classes, dinners at the Herb Farm (an incredible dining experience), more Cirque shows, cocktail tours and the really big one…three nights in Las Vegas. That was the year we took Jenna, Joel, Mason (grandson) and Maylee (granddaughter) to Disneyland as their Christmas experience.
The point I am trying to make here is this, giving experiences has been a win-win for me and our kids. First I win because not only do I get to give them something, I get to do it with them. I can honestly say, I have thoroughly enjoyed every experience we have done with them. (Well there was one cooking class that was a huge BUST but I did love going with them.) Second they win because to be honest, our kids do OK. They really don’t need any more things in their lives. Especially things I might pick out for them.
I should add that this idea has rubbed off on our kids. We opened our presents with Jenna, Joel and the grandkids on Wednesday and they gave us a trip to the zoo. Now I love the zoo but what I was really thrilled in getting was being able to go with them! That’s the experience I love.
So I want to encourage everyone who has adult kids, consider giving them experiences. Even better, give them an experience that you can do together. Sometimes the gift of time is worth so much more than a new toaster.
PS: Just to make this travel-related I can tell you what we got the grandkids this year. A seven night cruise on Ovation of the Seas this July. We have talked so much about cruising with them that we just wanted to share that with them so they can see why we love it so much. I can’t tell you what we got the other kids because we haven’t given it to them yet. Maybe tomorrow after we open gifts.
“The purpose of life is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience.” ? Eleanor Roosevelt
by Jim Bellomo | Dec 22, 2018 | Uncategorized
So Monday is kind of the one year anniversary of the day that kicked off our entire travel agent/consultant odyssey. And I am going to save that story for Monday or Tuesday. But I did want to mention how we got to a place where last Christmas Eve was even possible.
As many of you know, I have a day job. One that I have been in for about 37 years. I do marketing and sales for a big yearbook printing company. It has been an amazing career and I have loved much of it but I am also getting to the point where I can see the end of that career. I have never been the kind of person who could just sit around and be retired. Can’t imagine playing golf or reading or even taking pictures all day. I would go stir crazy. I need a challenge. Plus, even though Kathleen and I are pretty set for retirement financially, if we go it on our savings and Social Security alone, we will do fine but we won’t be able to travel like we are used to. And we do love to travel.
Over the years I have imagined myself in lots of post-career jobs. Or as Mark (our franchise partner with Expedia) likes to say, “a Funtirement job.” I considered being a tour guide here in Seattle. I know I would love that and I kind of have a gift of gab for it. Thought about doing something with photography. Took an online class on taking corporate portraits and thought that might be pretty good. Heck, I could drive for Uber or Lyft. Or deliver for Amazon. I was truly up in the air about it and I was thinking that it was surely at least 5 years away at this point last year.
But Kathleen was retiring last December 15 (2017) and about four months before that, we received an e-vite from the aforementioned Mark and his lovely wife Kim to join them in exploring the possibility of us becoming travel consultants with Expedia Cruise Ship Centers right here in Redmond. Well, not exactly here in Redmond, but up on Redmond Ridge about 15 minutes away. They had seen our posts about cruising on Facebook and Twitter and had sent us the e-vite. After corresponding a few times with Mark and having a long discussion with Kathleen we decided that we should go ahead and attend a meeting of prospective consultants at the soon-to-open office. That’s right, at that point, the Redmond Cruise Ship Center wasn’t even open yet.
(An aside here: I just asked Kathleen when she thought we had gone to the first meeting at the Agency and she and I both thought it was mid-November. Went back and looked it up and it was Thursday, SEPTEMBER 14!)
We liked what we heard at the meeting and we liked the business plan so we decided that we would consider it down the road. Maybe Kathleen would think about getting involved in March or April of 2018 and I might start doing some training around that time as well and then I would jump in further, sometime in 2020. I mean, I had a full-time business I was running. In the meantime, we thought we would have access to tons of travel info, maybe get some discounts and certainly learn more about one of my favorite parts of traveling—planning it.
We made a verbal commitment to Mark and Kim in early November that we would be going forward but at a very slow pace. When we did that, Mark made a suggestion that we go ahead and get signed up so the training was available to us and so that we could attend the one face-to-face class we needed to do—selling travel insurance. The state requires that if you are selling insurance, you have some training so we signed up and did the insurance class in November. We were fully intending to not get overly involved (beyond the online training) until at least March or April for Kathleen and maybe a year or two down the road for me.
And then we had brunch on Christmas Eve.
To do two things at once is to do neither.” – Publilius Syrus
by Jim Bellomo | Dec 20, 2018 | Uncategorized
Ok, so I know this is supposed to be about travel but I am still just using these posts for two reasons. The first is to continue to learn WordPress. The second is to get into the habit of writing every day which I plan to do for 2019. I promise to revert to more travel-worthy topics in the new year. Plus I promise to sneak some cruising stuff in here as well.
Yesterday our two grandchildren (and their parents) came to see us from East Wenatchee (about 120 miles away) to celebrate my birthday (a day late) and Christmas (five days early). You have to understand that these two (Mason and Maylee), are the light of our lives. Mason wasn’t feeling too well but Maylee was at her best. And as it happened, Kathleen wasn’t feeling too well either.
They usually come over sometime before Christmas so that we can do some kind of a Christmas event and then exchange Christmas and birthday gifts. Which brings me to the mention of cruising. Our birthday gift for them this year is that we are taking them on a seven day Alaska cruise this summer on Royal Caribbean’s (RCL) Ovation of the Seas. The grandkids have never been on a cruise but their parents did one on RCL for their honeymoon in 2005.
So for our Christmas event I took them (Kathleen stayed home with both a bad head and stomach ache) to Enchant at what is now T-Mobile Park (used to be Safeco Field). It was a pretty amazing light show but that was about it. We had a great time with the kids but if they do it again next year, it’s not worth going back. It’s a one-time thing.
And as I write this (about noon on Thursday) they have left to take our precious grandkids home. We miss them so much but we FaceTime with them twice a week and will see them again either in January or for Mason’s birthday in February.
by Jim Bellomo | Dec 19, 2018 | Uncategorized
So my incredible bride thinks I am being grumpy because I keep criticizing my favorite cruise line, Celebrity. We have taken almost 20 cruises on Celebrity, and they have long been our favorite cruise line. They have just launched a new ship, The Edge, that two of our best friends are sailing on in the Caribbean as I write this.
My “brother from another mother” Bob (Kathleen says that’s what we are because we are so much alike) is live-blogging their cruise and I have not been responding to it well. For that reason, I have been designated as, “grumpy.” You can see Bob’s posts by clicking here. But I don’t think I am being grumpy. I think I am being proactive about my favorite cruise line.
Yesterday Bob got to meet and take a quick selfie with Lisa Lutoff-Perlo (not sure if I spelled that right), the CEO of Celebrity. He was really excited about it. I just asked him if he got a chance to ask her about the problems that X (that’s what long-time Celebrity cruisers call the line because all their ships have HUGE Xs on them) is currently having on all its ships—a qualified crew.
This is such an ongoing thing that I am going to give it a rest today and write about it a lot later on. Not just as it effects Celebrity but the entire cruise industry. And about that, maybe I am grumpy?
“There’s a fine line between angry and grumpy. Angry isn’t nice, but grumpy is funny.”–Rick Wakeman