Two days before travel specialist Amanda Poses’ clients, a family of four with two young teens, were scheduled to land in Dubai for vacation, violence from the Iran war began spilling over into the United Arab Emirates. Flights were starting to get canceled across the Middle East as drone strikes hit the Dubai airport, and Poses had to think on her feet.
“These specific clients are not alarmists by any stretch,” says Poses, the founder of Poses Travel & Co, a SmartFlyer affiliate, “but there was shrapnel falling [from the sky], so obviously we advised them not to go.” Poses was able to quickly secure refunds for the family—in some cases having to pull favors with local vendors in order to negotiate around cancellation policies—and she was able to rebook them on a nine-day trip to Italy instead of the Dubai vacation they had originally planned.
It is in times like these when travel specialists are at their most indispensable. During natural disasters and pandemics, global conflicts like the war in Iran, or occurrences of civil unrest (the recent cartel-related violence in isolated parts of Mexico), their localized expertise of seasoned travel advisors and their on-the-ground networks kick into high gear to help clients navigate an unfamiliar place during a potentially terrifying time. “It is not about booking a trip,” says Tom Barber, co-founder of Original Travel and a Condé Nast Traveler Top Travel Specialist. “It is about knowing what to do when something shifts overnight and having the confidence to act quickly.”
These days, waking up to yet another front-page news story about violence and chaos can feel incredibly disorienting and overwhelming, especially when you’re traveling to or near these current events. For a travel specialist, it’s beginning to feel like just another day on the job. “The moment a major crisis hits, it’s definitely like ‘game face on, all hands on deck, let’s go!’” says Zachary Rabinor, the founder of Journey Mexico. “But this is where we add a tremendous amount of value to our guests, to our suppliers, to everybody in our ecosystem,” he notes.
“Disruption planning is a constant, not something we dust off when a crisis hits,” adds Deb Fox, Chief Sales Officer at Abercrombie & Kent. “We have teams on the ground across every region we operate in, and that local intelligence is everything. You often know something is shifting before it makes the news.”
Sometimes there is a real threat to clients’ safety. In 2023, after a 6.8 magnitude earthquake near Marrakech, specialist Hicham Alaoui of Experience Morocco and his team pulled an all-nighter to attend to the over 50 clients he had who were traveling in and around the Atlas Mountains, the epicenter of the crisis: “We had people who opted to literally spend the night outside of their rooms because they just weren’t confident that the structures they were in weren’t going to fall.” On a night like that, “understanding the lay of the land was critical,” Alaoui says. “The earthquake took place and within an hour, we had all of our clients identified and we understood who could stay and who needed to be brought back to America.”
Events like that, of course, are rare. Oftentimes the job of a travel specialist is to allay the anxieties of an overly nervous traveler who may have read or heard something about a region that doesn’t reflect the reality on the ground. This past February, Rabinor of Journey Mexico had two couples flying from the US and Canada to Mexico City to visit the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve when cartel violence broke out in Puerto Vallarta. He was able to reassure them over the phone that the conflict was contained and far removed from the area in which their trip was taking place. “I got repeated messages from them about just how much that call meant, giving them not just my personal opinion, but our on-the-ground take,” Rabinor says. “We have 45 employees in Puerto Vallarta. We have a total of 65 staff throughout the whole country. So I could give real-time, very transparent updates on what we were seeing.”
