Employment Opportunities

Here's a job not easily out-sourced to the chatty telephone mavens in Bangalore, and that's talking to American teachers and other travel group organizers about passports.

Why? To do a good job you need to believe that overseas travel is an intrinsically good thing for young Americans, these days as perhaps never before. You need to know and like American teachers. Being one helps a lot. Having been one in the past is just as good. Having been a student in an American high school is OK too.

Having traveled to other places in the world is a "plus" as well, although not a very important one. Some of our best Admissions Coordinators had never left the United States before getting on the phone, and arranging trips for hundreds of others.

Which brings us to an important point: there's not a lot of personal overseas travel involved if you come to work at passports. A trip to London or to Dublin or to another place where we gather people together for conventions may happen, but only once a year. The trip to Paris in June to check out your ten best group organizers does not always occur. "Fam" trips to exotic island locations sometimes do occur, but they are the exception to the rule. So don't think that the world becomes your oyster-in-a-suitcase once you get your passports employment badge. It doesn't.

What does happen is that you get to work in Spencer, Massachusetts (or in San Francisco, or Los Angeles), and that you make a decent salary, with decent benefits. You get to talk to people about travel all day long. You get to rub shoulders with people who have been doing this for decades, and enjoying it. You get special treatment if you are particularly good at your job.

You also get to help design custom travel itineraries, to try your hand at writing marketing prose, and to be of help to the people who work all week long booking travel services overseas. (They bark, though.)

Don't bother applying for tour leader assignments overseas unless you are particularly well-qualified. We make a point of hiring these people in Europe, this in the interest of our traveling clients.

If, having heard all this, you're still interested, send us a nice Email message at info@passports.com. Don't send us any attachments until we know you better. It was a (then) new employee who, several years ago, taught us not to open any Email attachments from strangers.