By KATIE SCHMIDT
UW News Lab
On Kirkland Way, past the coffee shops and restaurants, past the Kirkland Performance Center and the smoothie stores, there’s an inconspicuous two-story building that says “Professional Travel Service” on its front.
Even though the business keeps a low profile, it might be a familiar sight to residents passing through the area; in 1970 this travel agency was started in a little house just a few blocks away. Forty years later, after planning thousands of trips to every continent on the planet, the business itself has stayed right here, in a quiet corner of Kirkland.
But not everything is unchanging at Professional Travel. In August, it gained a new division called Sporting Travel and Tours, the brainchild of travel agents Charlie Brakebill and Julie Ganak. Sporting Travel and Tours specializes in planning trips to sporting events around the world.
“With the way the economy is today, we had to look at something that was really going to spark people’s interest,” said Brakebill about starting the new division.
She and Ganak, who left jobs at another travel agency in order to start Sporting Travel and Tours, explained that they have chosen to focus on a niche travel market that mirrors their own passions.
“We wanted to kind of just get the word out there because a lot of people think that, you know, going to the masters golf tournament is just prohibitively expensive,” said Ganak. She said that many people aren’t aware that trips to big events like this can be catered to different travel budgets.
She added that she is a fan of soccer in general and the Seattle Sounders in particular. Brakebill said that her main interests were tennis and equestrian sports.
Ganak and Brakebill said they anticipate the U.S. Open Tennis Tournament, U.S. Open Golf, and the Soccer World Cup in South Africa will be particularly popular events to see this year.
Anita Bornemann, the manager of Professional Travel Service, said that she was glad to have Ganak and Brakebill working with her. She said that the close relationships between employees at the company made it possible to give people like Ganak and Brakebill ownership over their ideas and to allow them the freedom to start their own division within the company.
“I personally have been here since 1991, and I have agents who have been here for 30 years, which is almost unheard of,” said Bornemann.
She said that Professional Travel is a midsize agency with about 20 employees, but that they had been in one place for so long that it felt like a family.
Leah Eskenazi, who started working at the company in 1979, said that there was something addictive about being a travel agent.
“There’s never a dull moment. Let’s put it that way,” she said. “You go into some offices and the phones don’t ring, and here they light up like a Christmas tree some days.”
Eskenazi also said that trip planning has changed drastically since she started work at Professional Travel. Sitting in front of the computer she now uses to plan trips online, she recalled using the phone to make all of her reservations and handwriting plane tickets for customers.
Over her time with the company, she said that she has learned about countries all over the world and started to feel like she had traveled the globe from her office.
“I’ve had families that I’ve sent to Europe and I’ve been working on it for like five months and by the time they leave I feel like I’m on the trip with them,” she said. “It’s like you’ve started a story and you want to finish it.”
Ganak agreed. She said that all the trips she had planned to New Zealand made her feel like she knew the country first-hand, even though she has never traveled there herself.
“I have dreams about being there,” she said, laughing.
Katie Schmidt is a student in the University of Washington Department of Communication News Laboratory.
