Still passionate about travel after almost 20 years…

Travel is a passion; I’ve spent almost 20 years working in the travel industry starting my career in a Norfolk travel agency. I got lucky as my first boss was an entrepreneur who gave me many opportunities – at 16, I was negotiating deals with major tour operators but only over the phone, I wasn’t allowed out of the office until I looked a bit older!

Six years later, I decided to take a few months out to travel around Australia and found I couldn’t settle back in Norfolk so decided to move to London aged 21.

I loved city life and found myself working firstly for Teletext, then TUI, Virgin and back to TUI again before I got the opportunity to move to Manchester to run MyTravelLite – a low cost airline set up by MyTravel.

Not able to give up London life, I commuted back and forth each week splitting my time between London, Manchester and Birmingham, MyTravelLite’s home base. I was at MyTravel during the dark years, things were tough and the learning curve was steep but I wouldn’t have changed anything apart from perhaps the 5am starts each Monday morning.

An opportunity to join STA Travel, the world’s leading student and youth travel agency came up so I gave up the commuting and took the role of Managing Director of Global Product.

Whilst there, I decided to do an Executive MBA at London Business School, my parents were anti-education so I’d left school at 15 and although I’d had plenty of practical experience, I wanted to be challenged academically as well.

I had the idea for GoLearnTo.com on holiday when looking for a kite surfing course and I couldn’t find what I needed online.

I’d had similar experiences looking for Spanish lessons, dance, skydiving and sand boarding courses in the past and was fed up wasting days of my holiday looking for places that could offer me a course on holiday so after developing the idea with classmates at London Business School, GoLearnTo.com was born.

Increasing numbers of us crave more from our travels and GoLearnTo aims to provide our customers the opportunity to search for and book, life enhancing escapes that promise to work wonders.

Be inspired – pursue a passion on your next holiday

If you’d like us to feature a particular holiday course, please let me know as we are always looking for inspired ideas for new products.

Vanessa

Go Learn To speak Spanish, dance, cook, wine taste, kite surf, sail, surf, speak Italian, play the Flamenco guitar, create your own perfume, speak French, fight like a gladiator, windsurf, pair wine with cheese, speak Arabic – and more…