Travel Agent CV Examples & Writing Guide (Travel Consultant)

This sample is for a travel consultant with about ten years across a corporate travel management company, a leisure agency and a cruise line reservations centre. The name and employers are invented. Keep the shape, change the sales figures, systems and destinations to yours.

Whoever is hiring is usually either an agency owner paying you partly on commission or a travel manager filling a corporate desk. Both want the same four answers, in this order.

• Can you sell? Annual sales volume, bookings per month, average booking value, conversion rate. Commission-based agencies care about this above everything.
• Which systems? Amadeus, Sabre, Travelport (Galileo), plus the supplier portals and the agency back office and CRM. A corporate desk will not train you from zero on a GDS.
• What do you actually know? Destinations, products and niches: cruise, all-inclusive, Florida and Disney, safari, groups, weddings abroad, corporate air. Naming a niche beats claiming you can book anywhere.
• Will clients come back? Repeat rate, referral rate, review count, insurance attachment, or how you handled a disrupted trip. Retention is the whole business model in leisure travel.

“I want to see sales volume and average booking value on the first line. After that, tell me which GDS you live in and which supplier you know inside out. "Passionate about travel" is on every CV I get and it has never once told me anything.”

Use a personal statement if you have sold travel or worked a reservations desk. Use a career objective if you are switching in from retail, hotels or airlines. Either way, three lines and a number in the first sentence.

One bullet per thing you actually do, each with a figure. Below are bullets by area of the job. Use the ones that fit and swap in your numbers.

List 10 to 14, systems and product knowledge first. The soft skills matter in this job, but they only get read once the reader has seen you can work a booking system.

Booking systems and tools:

• GDS: Amadeus, Sabre, Travelport Galileo. Say which one and what you can do in it (price, ticket, exchange, refund, queue management).
• Cruise portals and supplier booking sites; name the lines and tour operators you book most.
• Agency CRM and back office systems; name the ones you have used
• Itinerary and proposal tools: Travefy, Umapped, or your own branded documents
• Card payments, deposits, final balance tracking, client money handling and commission reconciliation

Product and technical knowledge:

• Fare rules, advance purchase, change and cancellation penalties, and passenger rights for delays and cancellations
• Passport, visa and entry-requirement research, plus ESTA and eTA style authorisations
• Travel insurance products: cancellation, medical, cancel-for-any-reason cover and pre-existing medical condition cover
• Destination knowledge by region, season and price band; be specific about the ones you have sold or visited
• Group air allocations, rooming lists, cruise group benefits and weddings abroad logistics
• Corporate travel policy, negotiated rates, duty of care and unused-ticket tracking

Selling and service:

• Consultative questioning, budget qualification and proposal writing
• Upselling and cross-selling without over-promising
• Handling a bad day for the client: cancellations, medical emergencies, lost luggage, weather closures
• Working evenings and weekends in peak booking season (January to March in UK leisure travel)
• A second language, named with your level, since it opens whole client segments

There is no personal licence to be a travel agent in the UK, but there are real qualifications, and the business you sell for usually needs to be in the right protection schemes. Only list what you actually hold.

• Travel and tourism qualifications: a Level 2 or Level 3 diploma, an apprenticeship or a degree. Name the awarding body, the level and the year.
• CLIA cruise training. CLIA runs agent training for the UK and Ireland as well as the US; name the level or course you completed.
• IATA travel and tourism training courses. Name the exact course, since IATA runs many.
• IATA accreditation, held by the agency rather than by you, allows air ticketing. If you ticketed on an IATA-accredited agency's licence, say so; a corporate desk cares.
• Supplier and tourism-board specialist programmes. Individually they are short courses, so group them: "22 supplier and destination specialist programmes completed."
• Business travel training, for example through the Business Travel Association, if you are aiming at corporate desks.
• ABTA and ATOL. ABTA membership and an ATOL licence from the Civil Aviation Authority are held by the business, not by you, so write "ABTA member agency, sold ATOL-protected packages" rather than claiming a personal licence.

"Travel agent CV with no experience" is one of the most searched phrases for this job, and the good news is that agencies, homeworking networks and cruise lines hire beginners regularly. They want sales instinct, phone stamina and someone who will finish the training.

1. 1Put "Travel Consultant" or the advert's title under your name, not "Recent Graduate".
2. 2Write a three-line career objective built on transferable sales numbers: target achievement, calls per day, upsell rate, average transaction value, guest counts.
3. 3Rewrite past jobs as travel-shaped bullets. Retail becomes conversion and average sale. Hotel or restaurant becomes guest volume and complaint recovery. Any call centre becomes call volume and resolution rate.
4. 4Do the free and cheap training and list it: an introductory travel and tourism course, cruise line academies, and tourism board destination specialist courses. Ten of them is a real line on a CV.
5. 5Add a short "Destination knowledge" block with the three or four places you genuinely know, and say how you know them (lived there, six trips, family ties, language).
6. 6If you have planned real trips for other people, write it as a project line with the number of travellers and the budget managed.
7. 7One page, no photo, PDF. Keep the file name simple.

• One page if you are new; two pages is normal in the UK once you have several years of sales figures, an agency team or a large corporate programme to show.
• Order: header with target title, personal statement or career objective, sales snapshot, skills and systems, experience, qualifications, education. A three-line sales snapshot near the top works well in this field.
• Single column, plain layout, no photo and no date of birth. That is the UK convention, even though some European travel employers still expect both.
• Do not decorate it with palm trees, plane icons or a world-map background. Agency owners read on a phone and applicant tracking systems drop graphics.
• Commission-only and self-employed work counts. Label it clearly: "Independent travel consultant, homeworking with a host agency", with your annual sales volume.
• If you were furloughed or left the industry between 2020 and 2022, one short line explaining it is fine and expected in this field.
• PDF unless the advert asks for Word. Name it Firstname-Lastname-Travel-Consultant-CV.pdf.
• Applying in the US? The title there is usually travel advisor and you send a one-page resume. Sabre is more common there; in the UK, Amadeus and Galileo matter as much.

Advert words to mirror when they are true: GDS, Amadeus, Sabre, Travelport, ticketing, exchanges, itinerary, tailor-made, leisure travel, business travel, cruise, all-inclusive, group travel, weddings abroad, supplier relations, travel insurance, upselling, client retention, CRM, out-of-hours support, duty of care, ABTA, ATOL, commission.