Luxury Travel Advisor - August 2007 - (Page 59) AnneMorganScully This dreamweaver, rainmaker, mentor and lover of life puts McCabe World Travel on the map. A nne Morgan Scully is a born teacher. She also loves to sell. She has an innate passion for all varieties of travel, savoring a cozy guest room in Europe nearly as much as a top suite on a luxury cruise ship. She adores almost everyone and gives those who aren’t so nice a break. (For example, tough clients aren’t difficult, they’re simply “incompatible.”) These attributes combined comprise an individual who is an icon in the luxury travel industry, known as much for her innate adeptness at creating the ultimate dream trip as for her ability to train and inspire the next generation of luxury travel agents. How do you zone in on such a dynamic individual? Luxury Travel Advisor admitted right up front to Scully that a vivacity for life such as hers is rare these days and that we found her boundless energy to be almost daunting. And so we asked her the obvious: “What drives you?” “I love what I do. I am happy to come to work,” the president of McCabe World Travel told us. “I think it is luck that you choose a career that never becomes a job. It’s the perfect career for me, because when I pick up the phone every day I don’t know what continent I’ll be on next.” Scully’s 30-year travel career was preceded by a very successful stint working and traveling across the country for Travelers, for whom she was an expert on teaching the new Medicare rules. Once she started a family, though (she has two daughters, Elizabeth and Marguerite), her focus migrated to home life. Travel was still a reality, however, since her husband Dennis was an Air Force pilot whose role mandated that the family move around the country about every two years. (Actually, that’s modest: He was a Top Gun fighter pilot who served two stints in Vietnam.) Thus finding herself based in Las Vegas in 1978, Scully enrolled in travel school at the University of Nevada. “I thought it was fun. I ate it up,” she says, noting that she already had sales experience, having sold ads for the “wives’ club” magazine at $100 a pop. “I had the natural ability to say, ‘Come on, just do it,’” she says, grinning. Scully moved to the Florida Panhandle, where she began work at a travel agency. While fam trips with a young family were not an option, her employer did send her cruising on Carnival’s Mardi Gras in 1980, which cemented her career as a travel advisor. “It was truly a life-changing experience,” says Scully. “I liked the comradery on board and as a young mother, I had this incredible feeling of reconnecting with myself. I think cruises do that—they pull you out of the environment that you’re so used to and give you the time to reflect on who you are and what you want to do with your life.” After that trip, Scully was hooked on sailing, and her newfound passion gave her the ability MCCABE WORLD TRAVEL AND LUXURY CRUISES OF THE WORLD CEO: Damian McCabe President: Anne Morgan Scully Number of Agents: 28 employees; 12 in house Annual Volume of Business: $24 million Business Mix: 80 percent leisure; 20 percent corporate Affiliation: Virtuoso Website: www.mccabeworldtravel.com; www.luxurycruisesoftheworld.com to sell a cruise even to those clients who walked in asking for a ski vacation. She quickly became the top sales person for Carnival in the Panhandle region and never looked back. The Scullys moved again, however, this time to Shreveport, LA, where one new mentor taught her to be an international sales agent. Along the way, Scully says she had a few, nowfunny “learning experiences” which only helped her to be a better agent. “I am good at training people today because I have been in every hole you can be in,” laughs Scully. “The secret is knowing that you can get out of it with the right attitude. I really learned to be a good agent in Shreveport.” Fate intervened, and Dennis Scully was asked to serve on the staff of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. This well-deserved honor meant that the Scullys were finally able to settle down in 1985 in the Washington, D.C. area, where they have resided ever since. For Anne Morgan Scully, this was the big time and she was ready to take it on. Still working as a travel agent, she bid on and won the travel business for the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. “That group business was incredible. One trip was with the great Rostapovich, who traveled on a cruise to the Baltics with some of the members,” says Scully. Other well-known individuals also became clients. “I picked up the phone one night and Barry Goldwater was on the line,” she says. “You never knew who would be calling.” Scully is mum on the other high-profile clients she worked with, many of whom she retains today. “I was good at keeping secrets and they knew I was. To this day I won’t tell a child what a mother said and I am complimented on that all the time. I teach that, because privacy is important.” After a stint in upper management BY RUTHANNE TERRERO www.luxuryta.com August 2007 | LUXURY TRAVEL ADVISOR 59 http://www.mccabeworldtravel.com http://www.luxurycruisesoftheworld.com http://www.luxuryta.com
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