They Left Tech, Law, and Hotels to Become Travel Advisors. Their Old Careers Are Now Their Biggest Edge.
A new wave of luxury sellers brings financial rigor, operational fluency, and Silicon Valley systems thinking into an industry that’s never needed them more.
Photo: Frugal Flyer / Unsplash
When Amy Shamus left her high-profile role at Google three years ago, she wasn’t looking to become a travel advisor. She was looking for a life that allowed her to be present at her home in Santa Barbara, California, present for her three young boys, and present for the work itself in a way that her decade-plus in corporate events never quite permitted.
What she found, almost accidentally, was that the 11 years she’d spent producing intricate events for one of the world’s most demanding companies had given her something most new advisors spend years trying to build: an operational knowledge of how luxury hotels actually work.
“Most of the events we did were at beautiful five-star hotels,” Shamus told Luxury Travel Report during last week’s Cadence Connects, held in Westlake Village, California. “That was my gateway drug into luxury hotels.”
Shamus’s Studio SCM is now a top producer for the San Diego-based host agency. But she’s also part of something larger than her own career pivot: a wave of advisors entering luxury travel from fields like tech, law, finance, and hospitality management. They arrive with a different vocabulary, a different set of instincts, and, increasingly, a different kind of value proposition for their clients.
The question the industry is starting to ask is not just where they came from, but what they’re changing.
The supplier-side advantage
For Desiree Norman of ONĒRA Travel, the transition into advising meant crossing from one side of the check-in desk to the other. After years with Ritz-Carlton, including stints in Tokyo, Barcelona, and Hong Kong, and an early internship at Paris’s famous Bar Hemingway, Norman moved to Southern California and eventually built a client base that now skews roughly 80 percent American, with the remainder drawn from an Asian network she cultivated over a career across seven countries.
What she brought with her was operational X-ray vision. Norman goes beyond just booking rooms at luxury hotels; she knows who to call—and at what hour—when something goes sideways. She understands check-in flow, guest profiling systems, and the difference between a general manager who empowers his team and one who leaves his staff flatfooted in a crisis.
“I know who to contact right away to get certain things done,” she said, “versus someone who’s not going to help me at 10 p.m. at night when I have an issue with a client that’s already in the hotel.”
That knowledge has direct consequences for her clients. When a last-minute booking at one of the world’s most lauded resorts hit an unexpected payment complication—a currency confusion resulted in a bank fraud alert that had a client questioning her trip in real time—it was Norman’s deep understanding of hotel operations, and her willingness to push for a management-level intervention, that eventually resolved the situation. The client arrived and, as expected, the trip delivered.
“I’ve really promoted your product,” she told the hotel. “And now, how are we going to fix this?”
Norman also uses her hotel background to create arrivals with a level of intentionality most advisors never consider. For a family from Paris visiting New York for the first time, with two young kids in tow, she pre-arranged a Ritz-Carlton amenity of team pennants and Legos waiting in the room. The end goal wasn’t generosity for its own sake. It was personalization as a sign that someone listened.
Points as a financial instrument
JJ Todd came to luxury travel from the opposite direction, not through hotels, but through numbers.
A former general counsel for a downtown Las Vegas redevelopment project, Todd had spent years as the person in every meeting whom everyone wanted to talk to—not about law, but about how he was always flying up front. His answer was points, which he had been studying with near-academic intensity since law school, when flying at 6-foot-10-inches in economy was simply not a viable option.
“A couple of my friends said, ‘My boss is sitting on 10 million points. Can you help him?’” Todd recalled. “That was my ‘a-ha’ moment.”
What Todd recognized was that for high-net-worth individuals, points programs are an underused asset class that’s often mismanaged. The misconceptions, he says, are by design. Credit card companies have gamified their programs in ways that make people feel flush while quietly delivering mediocre value.
The traveler who redeems points through a bank portal at one cent per point, he explains, has essentially been holding a one percent cash-back card without realizing it. The traveler sitting on 10 million airline miles in a co-branded program may be holding a currency that the airline can devalue overnight, without notice or recourse.
Todd now runs Las Vegas-based TravelWealth, which he calls a points wealth management practice, a retainer-based advisory that manages both the earning and redemption strategy for a client’s entire travel spend. His background in law has been more useful than he expected.
“As a lawyer, I could get you out of a jam, save you $500,000 in some lawsuit,” he said. “And all you would do is complain about how many hours I billed you. I book somebody a trip, and they come back thanking me.” The contrast, he says, is total.
The systems builder
Leigh Rowan runs Savanti Travel, a San Francisco-based luxury travel firm with 30 full-time salaried employees—including, notably, a contingent of former Emirates flight attendants who provide both global destination expertise and around-the-clock coverage across five continents. Before traveling, Rowan worked in marketing and, before that, ran a fishing boat. He is not someone who confuses a lot of volume with actual value.
What Rowan has built at Savanti looks less like a traditional travel agency and more like a concierge-adjacent advisory firm. Savanti operates on retainer and considers itself an extension of a client’s team, working alongside chiefs of staff, executive assistants, and family offices to manage the full architecture of a high-net-worth individual’s travel life. He’s been known to help plot a client’s day in London as precisely as an itinerary, identifying which meetings can realistically cluster in Chelsea versus Mayfair, because even on their 15th trip to London, people still think they can be in both neighborhoods in two hours.
Savanti’s client-intake process alone runs 90 minutes. The resulting dossier, which is cross-referenced against actual past reservation records to verify what clients say they want against what they’ve actually booked, lives in a CRM that informs every subsequent interaction.
When the Dubai airspace crisis hit in late February, Rowan’s team was managing clients stranded between closed airspaces, missile alerts, and a calendar full of corporate commitments. They ended up chartering aircraft for 300 expatriates—a Boeing business jet and an A330—before commercial routes reopened and the embassy called off the operation. It was not, he acknowledged, a repeatable business model. But it clearly illustrated Savanti’s value proposition: when money can’t solve the problem, relationships and knowledge have to.
“For our ideal clients,” Rowan told LTR, “we’ve been there for them 24/7 in the glorious fun planning stages—and then suddenly, ‘oh s—, I need rescue.'”
What they share
These advisors came from different industries and built distinct practices, but several threads run through them all.
The most consistent is a comfort with systems. All of them think in processes, with client intake frameworks, dossier architectures, booking-window strategies, and CRM logic. Shamus credits many years of Google’s zero-inbox culture with the responsiveness she brings to her clients; Todd approaches a points portfolio the way a financial analyst looks at a balance sheet; and Norman mentally maps every hotel arrival the way an operations director would plan a VIP event.
There’s also a shared fluency with (and lack of fear around) AI, at least among those who came from tech-adjacent worlds. Shamus uses it to draft itineraries she then refines by hand, builds polished client proposals that corporate contacts can hand up the chain, and asks it to comb hotel contracts for negotiating leverage. “I don’t look at it as a threat at all,” she said. “To me, I look at it as my little buddy. I’m just like, ‘can you help me with this thing?'”
Perhaps most notable, all of them had to know their clients deeply in their previous careers before they could do their jobs. Shamus spent years anticipating the needs of C-suite executives at high-stakes corporate events. Norman kept guest profile notes, the way Ritz-Carlton staff track returning guests’ preferences. Todd has had to understand clients’ full financial pictures before recommending a single credit card. Rowan revisits his clients’ bucket lists every quarter, checking whether last year’s trips have changed what they want next.
The former titles and salaries aren’t the point, however, these days. What these advisors carried into their new careers were habits of attention and those habits show up in their work today. A child walks into a New York hotel room and finds Lego bricks and a team hat waiting. A stranded executive gets a charter seat out of a conflict zone on a Friday night. And a small business owner learns that 10 million dormant points can fund a trip in a first-class Emirates suite. In each case, someone paid close attention and acted on what they knew.
The luxury travel market will always need advisors who know their destinations. But increasingly, it also needs advisors who understand their clients with the same depth as a good lawyer understands a client’s risk tolerance or a great hotel manager understands a returning guest’s preferences before they even check in.
It may not be a skill the industry has traditionally trained for, but it’s one that these advisors arrived with.
