Transat is us

Cindy Schell knows what’s really on the table when she sells vacation packages. It’s a lot more than plane tickets, a hotel or even the actual destination, however beautiful that is.

“We’re selling emotions, dreams,” says Cindy, a sales representative for Transat Tours Canada in southern Alberta. Her territory includes 125 travel agencies in the Calgary area, Medicine Hat and Lethbridge. That’s lot of people with dreams to realize. “I’m pretty outgoing and I’m eager to get up each day and do my job,” says Cindy, who has been working for Transat for six years. “I enjoy what I sell.”

Cindy, 36, began her career at Sears Travel when she was 21 after graduating from the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology, where she studied travel and tourism. She knew she wanted to be in travel at 14, when her parents took her on her first “big Europe trip… I just loved seeing how other people lived, the history and the shopping, of course.”

These days people are looking for new destinations to discover. “They’re looking for something more exotic,” Cindy says, adding that sun destinations are always popular and offer great value with the all-inclusive option but that people are also looking for different destinations, and that Spain and Greece are becoming more popular. Her challenge is to continue contributing to the expansion of Transat’s market share in the face of a growing number of competitors who offer low prices but don’t match Transat’s quality.