Tag: vacations
Fans Turn Love Of Disney Into Income As Travel Agents

Fans Turn Love Of Disney Into Income As Travel Agents

By Sandra Pedicini, Orlando Sentinel (TNS)

Kristy Ouellette remembers the words that changed the course of her career.

“I was a complete Disney World addict, and at one point my husband looked at me and said, we’re not going any more unless you get Mickey to pay you,”‘ said Ouellette, 39, of Merrimack, N.H. “He just said it off the cuff, but I looked at it as a challenge.”

So Ouellette became a travel agent specializing in Disney World trips. She ended up leaving her job with the state of New Hampshire to run her own agency, Mickey Guru Travel Co., which has 26 agents around the country.

Ouellette is one of many Disney fans-turned-travel agents. They set up everything from FastPass times to hotel reservations. In return they earn commissions from Disney, and some enjoy perks such as annual free tickets and discounted hotel rooms.

There are a number of agencies across the nation with names such as Off to Neverland Travel, Key to the World Travel and Kingdom Magic Vacations that focus on Disney vacations.

“The Disney travel agent business, I would think it would be a pretty good business,” said Duncan Dickson, a former Disney executive who now teaches at the University of Central Florida’s Rosen College of Hospitality Management. “You’re spending a lot of money and you want to get the most for your buck while you’re here. Why not hire someone who knows what they’re doing?”

Many people want to get in on the action. Ouellette says social media and the lure of the perks has fueled interest in the business.

“I probably get three to four emails a week from people who want to become an agent,” she said. “I have a really heavy screening process to figure out why they want to become agents. They don’t realize that there’s so much work that goes into it.”

Ouellette, for instance, is on call for her clients if they have questions once they get to the resort. One even texted Ouellette to ask where the nearest restroom was near the Pirates of the Caribbean ride.

Agents often do not charge clients for their services because they earn commissions from Disney.

Agents said the commissions they earn are generally between 10 to 15 percent. That is split between the company and the agents. Agents whose employers register them with either the Cruise Lines International Association or the International Air Transport Association can also get free tickets — one park-hopper each year to Disney World or Disneyland — and hotel discounts.

Disney originally didn’t pay commissions, but that changed as the resort began building more hotels, Dickson said. Disney decided the cost would be worth it, Dickson said, because travel agents could steer business toward its own lodging.

Some of the benefits have decreased over time. Some agents cried foul earlier this year when Disney Cruise Lines reduced its commissions for future cruises booked by customers already on board one of its ships.

Agent Joe DeFazio of Houston said some items such as the Memory Maker photo package can no longer be included in what’s eligible for a commission. “Sometimes you wonder where that’s going to go in the future,” said DeFazio, who has considered charging clients for planning services.

Some agencies are “earmarked,” meaning Disney considers them authorized vacation planners.

Many agents also go through an online College of Disney Knowledge program to learn as much as possible about helping people get the most out of their vacations.

To work at Key to the World Travel, Stephen Juliano of Mechanicsburg, Pa. said he had to take a test showing he knew everything from which moderate resorts would be best for a family of five to when advanced dining reservations open online.

Like Ouellette, Juliano was a big Disney fan before he decided to try making some money off his knowledge of the resort.

Juliano, 27, has been a travel agent for about eight months and still has a full-time gig working in marketing for a credit union. He made a few thousand dollars this year, but “I’m really trying to find more and more clients. I would love to earn enough to turn this into my full-time job.”

DeFazio, a 46-year-old stay-at-home dad, also hopes to ramp up his work as a “Magic Maker” for Off to Neverland Travel.

He decided to get into the business because friends and family kept asking him for advice on planning their trips, knowing that he and his wife “were kind of Disney crazy. Eventually I started to say, there’s got to be a way to make some money.”

©2016 The Orlando Sentinel (Orlando, Fla.). Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Photo: Sleeping Beauty’s Castle is pictured during Disneyland’s Diamond Celebration in Anaheim, California May 23, 2015. REUTERS/Mario Anzuoni

Meditate For Success

Meditate For Success

We ambitious strivers seeking guidance from fitness pros, decluttering experts, and TED talks often find the day divided in two unequal parts. Three-quarters goes to overworking. The remaining quarter is for countering the ill effects of overworking. We do the latter not necessarily to nurture our souls but to boost performance during the working hours.

You see, overworking and stress slow our productivity. Herein lies a paradox.

Relaxation, vacations, and a good night’s sleep could be seen as key to personal well-being. But gremlins have taken a wrench to our puritanical brains and put dollar values on our inner peace and repose. They are now a means to goose our output.

Consider the advice to get eight hours of sleep a night. Good sleep leaves one feeling refreshed, less depressed, less stressed. But it also has a utilitarian purpose. It boosts our performance at work. Thus, we use apps to ensure we’re maintaining eight-hour sleep periods incorporating five REM cycles.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has the numbers: Sleep deprivation costs the U.S. economy $63 billion a year in lost productivity.

We seek techniques to do more per unit of time. For example, there are articles on how to “optimize” a three-day weekend. (To think, Americans used to have three-week vacations.)

Our employers are famously ungenerous with paid vacation. But many of us don’t even use the time we’re given. A study commissioned by the U.S. Travel Association estimates that in 2013, Americans left 429 million paid vacation days on the table.

Why? Some said their workload is so heavy they can’t afford to get away. If they don’t complete their assignments, they may not have a job upon returning.

The travel association is now selling vacation time as a tool to raise the gross domestic product. If workers used all their available time off, the study says, U.S. business revenues would rise by $160 billion, and tax collections would rise by $21 billion.

Meditation, the great teacher Jon Kabat-Zinn tells us, is “for no purpose other than to be awake to what is actually so.”

But suppose it helps us better focus our attention. Wouldn’t that make us more useful worker bees? Sure.

A Google executive told Bloomberg TV that “wisdom traditions like yoga and meditation help us operate better.” He noted that the most important technology we have is the human body and brain. Yoga and meditation help us, he explained, “optimize this technology.”

Thanks to Google’s yoga program for its employees, he added, “there’s been a huge impact on both people’s productivity and culture.”

So yoga has become a get-ahead tool. Small wonder yoga teachers see participants aggressively jostling for mat space in their classes, according to The Wall Street Journal.

There’s also a smartphone app that lets students follow the instructors of their choice. That way, if a star yoga teacher is not going to lead a particular class, they don’t have to waste their time on a B-lister.

What healthy habits don’t do for productivity, drugs will. Many American workers are apparently taking medications for treating attention deficit hyperactivity disorder solely to improve their output at work.

Taking these stimulants can cause addiction, anxiety and hallucinations, but for intense competitors, they are jet fuel. As a woman in her late 20s told The New York Times, they are “necessary for survival of the best and the smartest and highest-achieving people.”

We really can’t blame health advocates for toting up the economic benefits of more relaxed living. That’s often the only argument anyone notices anymore.

Meditation improves concentration. Heck, let’s meditate — and medicate — to better meditate. It’s the American way.

Follow Froma Harrop on Twitter @FromaHarrop. She can be reached at fharrop@gmail.com. To find out more about Froma Harrop and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Web page at www.creators.com. 

Photo: Balint Földesi via Flickr

Dick Cheney Is Still A Petty Hypocrite

Dick Cheney Is Still A Petty Hypocrite

Former vice president Dick Cheney resurfaced again this week, to sharply criticize President Barack Obama for being on vacation when ISIS murdered American journalist James Foley.

During a Wednesday night appearance on Fox News’ Hannity, Cheney reiterated his belief that President Obama doesn’t understand foreign policy, and slammed him for playing golf after making a statement condemning Foley’s killing and denouncing ISIS as a “cancer.”

“Every day we find new evidence that he’d rather be on the golf course than he would be dealing with a crisis that’s developing rapidly in the Middle East,” Cheney insisted.

Cheney is not the only person to criticize President Obama for taking a working vacation, nor is his criticism the most ridiculous (for example, The Hill recently criticized the president for taking a walk while “the White House grapples with crises at home and abroad”). But the complaints are especially galling coming from the 46th vice president.

For starters, Cheney’s former boss blew Obama out of the water in terms of time spent away from Washington. To date, President Obama has spent about 150 days on vacation. During his two terms, according to accepted presidential vacation expert Mark Knoller of CBS, George W. Bush spent 1,020 days487 at Camp David, 490 at his Crawford, Texas ranch, and 43 at the Bush family compound in Kennebunkport, Maine.

But guess who Cheney thinks was better at dealing with crises in the Middle East (never mind the question of who’s responsible for them)?

Cheney himself has some experience with executive branch vacations. Back in 2005, Cheney hesitated to cut his own vacation short after Hurricane Katrina struck, and then pointedly turned down President Bush’s request that he lead a task force designed to speed the recovery effort (White House advisor Dan Bartlett reportedly backed the decision, noting that the vice president “doesn’t do touchy-feely“).

For its part, the White House insists that, like his predecessors, President Obama is perfectly capable of doing his job from outside of Washington. But that won’t stop the media from obsessing over his vacation. After all, punditry is hard during the dog days of summer — and overeager critics like Cheney are always ready for their closeups.

Screenshot via Foxnews.com

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