Our Love for travel is born

Working for an airline comes with many exciting benefits. From a work aspect, the industry is super thrilling with constant change, aim for improvements and never ending challenges. Yes, pretty much all natural disasters, unrest in countries and unexpected extreme weather situations impact our customer's travel. And with this, each of the above impacts our service center and work. So when we see a tornado hitting America, a political situation in Cairo or unexpected snow chaos in Europe on the news, we automatically think of work and wonder what the impact will be to our call volumes. But that is another story for another day :) 

Today, I want to tell you of the time our love for travel was born. Gunther and I met in 1999 at Cape Technikon. We quickly fell in love and knew right there and then that this would be a thing that would last a long time. ♥ So as time progressed, we started planning our future and with that our first international vacation together. Little did we know of the beauty of the world outside of South Africa back then and opted to visit Germany, my country of birth, in the September of 2003. We planned for 3 weeks away, spending our time with the different parts of my family: my grandmother, my uncles, aunts and cousins and the majority of the time with my stepsister and her family in Hamburg.

This very first trip was an easy one to plan and arrange. Accommodation was sorted. We flew standby the very first time (as airline employees, one is able to purchase a reduced fare seat, however this does not guaranteed a place on the plane) and as nervous as we were, we did get on with only a seat or two to spare. Yes, I hadn’t set a foot on a plane since we moved to South Africa in 1990 and as I entered and experienced everything again, a new love and passion was born. Soon to learn that this getting on board a plane and the feeling of you want to go explore the world, would be one that would reoccur each year after that.

The travel bug had bitten us both.

'The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page' ~~Saint Augustine

Our holiday in September 2003 was unforgettable. We spent many fun times in Hamburg, Berlin and surroundings and the three weeks over there flew by incredibly fast. We were treated like a King and Queen.

It was a few years later in 2006 that my colleague Vicki mentioned that she had found these cute islands which were really reasonably priced with the low South African Rand buying power and we decided to go on a couple holidays together. As already mentioned earlier, the travel industry comes with many unexpected impacts and so during this time, I remember a major strike in Germany affecting our business and this resulted in us needing to move the vacation. But that was no problem and we ended up leaving for Koh Samui one month later. April 2006. 

Circling the island before landing

Gorgeous color ocean

Koh Samui - our piece of heaven on Earth

Almost there

If the first trip to Germany was not enough, then this second trip to Thailand was enough to seal the deal! That is how it all began: our love for travel. In between, I was lucky to visit Canada for 1 month while a new service center was opened there and also Istanbul in Turkey for a week. The world is big, the world is beautiful. So many cultures, colors, textures, tastes. Travel will be a further branch to our blog-tree we want to share with you as we plan to take many more road trips and many more plane trips over the years to come. In the meantime, I will share with you tips of our past trips, specifically of Thailand where we by now have been 4 times since. 

Until next time…

Blog Photo Attribution: By Pier-Luc Bergeron, LucBurgTender
Blog Photo 1 Attribution: By Victoria Nevland