In this blog post, I’ll show you how to go beyond mere travel experience and effectively incorporate the customer empathy and authenticity required for a travel sales job into your cover letter.

 

Growing up

Growing up, my parents were the kind of people who never stopped expanding their horizons by investing their capital in traveling, rather than just trying to build a stable life and wealth. Even after they got married after a chance meeting in a hostel while backpacking across Europe, and even after they settled into the realities of working and raising a family, their hearts were always set on the faraway lands beyond the ocean. While many people think of me as a very wealthy child when I say that I was able to “travel around the world” during my childhood, my parents were just ordinary people who were more interested in traveling than in saving for a house or other things that most people are interested in.
Whenever people would say, “You can’t afford to live like that,” or “You shouldn’t travel until you can afford to,” my parents would respond, “You should enjoy yourself while you still have the energy. It’s not about mortgaging your happiness for later pleasures, it’s about fitting it into your life and reaping the rewards. Just like a favorite side dish that you put off indefinitely as “happiness for later,” it will spoil and deteriorate and you won’t be able to enjoy its full flavor, so when you try to get your happiness back later, you won’t be able to fully enjoy it with a less energetic body. My parents’ philosophy that life’s pleasures should be appropriately allocated to immediate practical needs and enjoyed to the fullest, rather than hoarding them in savings and enjoying only a small portion of them, had a profound impact on me.

 

Academic life

I was able to travel abroad more than other children, and this gave me a more developed outlook. Unlike my peers, who rarely ventured out of the town where they were born, or if they did, their experiences were limited to traveling in Korea to visit relatives who lived far away, I realized early on that “the world we see is not the whole world,” as my travel-loving parents took me to famous tourist destinations and to Korea that most kids would have only seen in textbooks or maps. In addition, my own experience of being in other countries and realizing the need to learn a foreign language, rather than just mechanically learning English for exams or studying, inspired me to actively learn the language of other countries, as I realized that lack of language halves the fun. Although my progress was more focused on conversation than grammar and writing, I was able to develop my skills through hands-on practice, which was quite advanced compared to my peers at school.
As a result of these experiences, I was naturally drawn to travel and aviation-related fields. I knew from an early age that I wanted to work in a field where I could utilize my aptitudes and play to my strengths, as I had been exposed to more experiences than my peers. Like my parents, I knew that I wanted to expand my horizons by traveling regularly throughout my life, and I wanted to pursue a career path that would facilitate that opportunity. I was determined to set myself on a path that would align my aptitudes and interests, which I had been able to hone since childhood, and that would allow me to be exceptionally motivated in my work.

 

Personality Pros and Cons

I am a person who wants to do my best without regret, both at work and in my free time. While the world often emphasizes the nobility of hard work by saying things like “be diligent and patient,” “bend over backwards to learn,” and “save your pleasures for later and make up for your shortcomings,” it’s important to remember that even a machine that runs around the clock needs regular breaks, and if a person doesn’t take the proper time to relieve stress and fatigue that pushes them to their limits, they can burn out. Just as a machine that is left to run without regular breaks or maintenance will eventually break down, costing far more time and money to fix than if it were maintained on an ongoing basis, the human body is also prone to problems if it is not given the same leeway.
Also, just as we give our all to our jobs, if we don’t allow ourselves enough leisure time to unwind and rejuvenate for tomorrow, our motivation to move our bodies is bound to diminish. Sometimes people only value the time we spend working and putting in the effort, and neglect the rest of our lives, but I think it’s always worth keeping in mind that rest is a virtue that must accompany us in order to pursue our more long-term goals.

 

outlook

We want to live a life that doesn’t put the enjoyment of life on the back burner. We all have different goals and pleasures that we want to achieve in life, but we all have our own hopes for a steady paycheck, accomplishments, and future endeavors. Some of us are the type of people who find a steady stream of fun in the consumable parts of our lives and make a reasonable compromise, while others save their grand dreams for last and take a long time to achieve them. Some of us put off the pursuit of pleasure with thoughts like “when I’m better off,” “when I buy a house,” or “when I achieve something in the field I’m in,” and some of us are intimidated by the very act of enjoying the benefits of life because we’ve spent so much time not enjoying it to its fullest.
We don’t just exist to accomplish things and do the labor that we deserve as members of society, but we also have a responsibility to properly lubricate our lives, take breaks, and enjoy the world that we’ve been given, and I think that’s something that’s easy to overlook in the rush to succeed, but it’s something that we should always pay attention to.

 

Work history

○○I started my career in the airline industry, where I spent three years building up my capabilities.

 

Motivation and post-employment aspirations

I grew up traveling internationally thanks to my parents, and as I gained a lot of experience, I thought to myself, “I want other people to have this kind of fun. I joined your organization because I wanted to help people feel comfortable with the idea of traveling abroad as part of a broader experience, instead of seeing it as a once-in-a-lifetime decision that they need to make at the end of their lives.
If I can be at the forefront of helping people experience new things at your organization, I want to play a role in ensuring that as many people as possible can experience the joys and enjoy the pleasures of life, having already lived and enjoyed the benefits from an early age. Long flights are such an important part of traveling in and of themselves, acting as a gateway of sorts, that just having good service can have a positive effect on making the experience much more relaxing and lowering the barriers to travel.