Finding Long-Term Careers in Travel

Some dream of getting paid to travel the world, while others have found a lifetime career in the tourism industry at home.

In late 1960s New Orleans, Charlie Farrae–a recent high school graduate–”got called for work on a Tuesday and came to work on a Wednesday,” as he likes to put it.

“When I got out of high school, I didn’t want to work for anybody,” Charlie says. But a former classmate urged him to interview for a bellboy position at a local hotel.

“As long as I fit the uniform,” Charlie remembers, “the job was mine.” And lucky for him, it fit.

Charlie spent five years as a bellboy and was later promoted to a number of front desk and managerial positions at the family-owned Hotel Monteleone–the French Quarter’s oldest and largest.

Now nearly four decades later, he holds the title of “Hotel Historian” and has managed to reject a number of offers trying to lure him elsewhere.

Four days a week he provides new and returning guests with his wealth of knowledge on the 124-year-old hotel that started with just 64 rooms. It now holds more than 600, as well as 55 suites.

At Charlie’s side has been Raoul Vives, a bellman at the Hotel Monteleone for 45 years. He fondly remembers a slew of celebrity guests including Robert Mitchum, Paul Newman, and a controversial (and still disputed) visit by Fidel Castro in the mid-1960s.

The ones he remembers most though are the everyday people who have become his “regulars.” They’ve shared Christmas cards and letters over the years, but what gets him is when the letters stop coming.

“They just disappear, and I worry,” says Raoul. While the Monteleone only suffered roof damage after Hurricane Katrina, Raoul felt the greatest loss in the people that never came back–guests and a number of co-workers whom he’d known for decades.

Charlie has had the privilege of hosting all three of his daughters’ wedding receptions at the Monteleone, as well as his granddaughter’s, at cost, due to the generosity of the management. “I’m taking care of the grandchildren of the guests I used to take care of,” he says. “It’s a wonderful family hotel. If it was a corporation, they would have kicked me out a long time ago.”

In Montana’s Glacier National Park, Rachel VandeVoort grew up as a self-proclaimed “river rat.”

At the age of 6 she began coming to work with her father, a white water and fishing guide, at Montana’s oldest Glacier Raft Company.

Growing up, she started helping in the shops, folding T-shirts, and taking the occasional trip down the river with her dad. “As soon as I was old enough, I went to Glacier Raft right away and signed up for work,” Rachel says.

Continue reading this article at PeterGreenberg.com