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| Thursday, 26 July 2012 |
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| HELLOWESTTRAVEL.COM PROFILE: EDNA RAY | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Air Canada’s B.C. sales manager looks back at 30 years in the travel industry she calls home | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Amanda Stutt | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
After serving in industry roles ranging from airport interpreter to customer service representative to ticketing agent in the United States, Brazil, South Africa and Canada, Ray looks back at the winding road that ultimately led to where she is today, and believes everything happens for a reason, in its own time. The early years Ray was born in Rio de Janerio, Brazil, and laughingly refers to herself as the original “girl from Ipamena” as she was born on Ipanema Beach. She attended the Lycee Francais Bresilien, a private French school where French speaking diplomat’s children went. Her father was a lawyer and her mother was with the Brazilian Ministry of Education.
While Ray’s family and friends travelled far and often, she loved Brazil, and it wasn’t until she was 17 that she felt ready to leave her home country. She went to the U.S. to be an exchange student in her senior year of high school, living in Michigan while her brother was an exchange student in Idaho at the same time. “That was a pivotal time in my life, because I thought I would like to go back to the States, and I wound up going to University in California, at San Diego State,” she remembered. Ray studied journalism, and took her first job as a travel agent to earn extra money while in university. She said a job in the travel industry looked like a good prospect because she was multilingual and loved to travel. “My parents were paying for my education, but I wanted a part time job to supplement my shopping needs,” Ray quipped. “I had no idea what being a travel agent really entailed. I started working as a junior at an agency, learning the ropes.” But what was supposed to be a part time student job turned out to be more. “I fell in love with the business- just fell in love,” she said. What’s meant to be... Ray headed home to Brazil on summer break from school and took another travel industry position that capitalized on her multilingualism.
“I wanted a job that would force me speak English, so I got a job as an interpreter at the airport.” As fate would have it, Ray met her future husband through that job. “He arrived on a flight. He was an English speaking South African. He needed some information and directions to his hotel, and I assisted him,” she said. The very next day, Ray’s future husband showed up at the airport again. “He came back and started talking to me. Back in those days, it was the '70s, people could come back to the airport anyway to get a ticket exchange, baggage, whatever reason”. It didn’t take long before Ray figured out she was the reason he had some back to the airport though. The two set a date to meet at his hotel for poolside brunch the following day. “Before leaving my house, I called the hotel to say I was on my way, and I asked for his name and they said that he had checked out. I assumed he was gone, so I went to the beach and forgot all about it,” she remembered. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to Ray, he had checked out and taken up post by the pool to wait for her. Each believing that they had been stood up by the other, and living halfway across the world from one another, the prospects were dim. Long distance romance
The postcard was treated by co-workers at the Rio airport as a message in a bottle- and they forwarded it to Ray’s mother- who forwarded it to Ray at university. The two figured out how lines had gotten crossed in Rio and began communicating by mail and telephone. They made plans to meet in Vancouver for a holiday, a city she had never been to before; the same city they wound up settling down in. Ray remembered that he proposed in Vancouver, at the landmark Gastown clock, hours after she arrived. “It’s funny how things go around. He picked me up at YVR and proposed. It’s how things were meant to happen I guess.” Rising in the industry ranks They married in Rio and then moved to Johannesburg, South Africa. After travelling and exploring Africa, Ray found a travel industry job with TAP, Portugal’s National Airline, in customer service at the airport.
Brazil just happens to be the only Portuguese speaking country in Latin America. A big break came when the airport manager brought a general manager from Varig Brazilian Airlines to her counter, and the two began conversing in Brazilian Portuguese. “I remember he said: 'What is a Brazilian doing working for TAP?' And I said: 'I guess because you haven’t given me a job yet!'” Again, Ray had made an impression. The manager hired Ray at Varig and asked her what she wanted to do at the airline. Her answer: sales. A big move A couple of years later, Ray and her husband emigrated to Vancouver. Her first job in the Canadian travel industry was with Canadian Pacific Air Lines and later Pacific Western Airlines. The two merged to become Canadian Airlines which eventually merged with Air Canada. She worked as a reservations agent at a call centre on West Hastings for years until learning she was among the agents laid off during the merger and acquisition process.
“There were six of us in the office; a mix of agents from Pacific Western Airlines, Air Canada and Wardair. I remember setting up the files and plugging in the computers,” she said. When technology changed everything, everywhere Ray remembers writing out tickets by hand and the old ticket validator machines, but acknowledges how technology has changed the travel industry. “The issue with the Internet is interesting. Now everything is available [online]. Everything you want is there and we have become very demanding with things being right there, right now. We want the information right now. We want the action right now. But that’s not unique to the travel industry. That’s everywhere in life now.” “In many ways, the way we do business now is so completely different than the way it was before,” she said. A resilient and resourceful industry
“The one thing about the travel industry that is very different from other industries is that we truly get affected by everything: the weather, the news, the economy, social issues, personalities, fads - everything around us - the air we breathe, everything impacts the industry. One thing that we know is that two days will never be the same. Something is going to be different. All the little things that can change seem so small, but the consequences are massive.”
She also believes that in the travel industry, everything is cyclical. “If you look at how things have changed, it’s almost like we’re full circle again, but we have to embrace the changes as they come and continue to work with the tools that we have”. Coming home Today, Ray has been happily married 30 years, living in Vancouver with three grown children. She said her proudest achievement is her children, and she would most like to be remembered for being fair and doing the right thing. “The one word that comes to mind in every relationship, be it business or personal, is respect. So that’s the way I approach things. I will treat people the way I want them to treat me. Respect and communication are what’s important to me.”
“It was like going home. It was the same office I had worked on West Hastings years before. It was meant to be. I remember the HR person asking if I had trouble finding the place and I said ‘no, I’ve been here before’. It was really awesome.” |
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