Studying and working in travel

BSc (Hons) International Tourism Management graduate Georgia Francis works as a Digital Sales & Merchandising manager for TUI
Georgia Francis

Working within travel and the digital space

I work at TUI as a Digital Sales & Merchandising manager. My role involves creating personalised website experiences and running tests to understand what works best for visitors. I chose this area as I find testing and personalisation really interesting. Not only is it fun to curate these experiences but diving into the reasons behind test results is fascinating. 
One of my favourite parts of the role is getting the results at the end of a test and seeing which variant won. 
This role was a great combination of my interests in travel and digital. It allows me to be creative but also analytical, which I enjoy. I really like the variety of tests we get to run too. Outside of my specific role, I love that there are opportunities to travel. Whilst working at TUI I've been on a cruise and to Spain, Morocco and Turkey – all as part of my job!
In a few years, I hope to still be working within travel and the digital space. Digital is constantly evolving so there's always something new and exciting around the corner.

Being a tourism student, I loved the trips abroad!

I got to visit Concarneau, Paris and Valencia. I was also keen to continue studying a language at university and being able to do this as part of my course was one of the reasons I chose Plymouth.
I really enjoyed the course content! It covered so many topics from the relationship between tourism and crime, sustainable tourism, and film and literary tourism. It gave me a great knowledge of the industry and set me up really well for my placement year in travel.
I gained a huge amount of industry insight, learnt new languages, improved my cross-cultural competence, developed research skills and refined my time management and teamwork skills!
The University also had a lot of support for students who were looking to undertake a placement year. The career’s team hosted sessions for us, shared placement opportunities and ran mock interviews.
At the end of my final year, I was really proud to be awarded the John Fowler Holidays prize for the Tourism Student with the Overall Highest Marks.

The placement scheme helped kick-start my career in travel

I did my placement at TUI in their Commercial Product Team. I worked on North Africa (Egypt, Morocco and Tunisia) and was responsible for ensuring we had the right mix of hotels in the destinations, that they were priced correctly, had the right content and were good quality. 
As part of the placement scheme, I had so many opportunities to take part in business projects, spend time with other teams and travel, teaching me a huge amount about how travel businesses operate and the travel market itself. I'd recommend a placement year to everyone!
Studying and working in travel is so much fun! If you're passionate about travel and want a job you'll love, the travel industry is a great place to work. Why not get paid to do something you love?
International tourism