A chiropodist who switched careers to become a travel agent says she was inspired to make the move following a powerful exchange with a former patient. 

Joe McDonnell joined Travel Counsellors in October, having previously run a private footcare practice full-time in Colchester. For nearly 15 years, the Essex native specialised in providing services for people in her local community, many of whom were elderly or had learning disabilities. 

She thoroughly enjoyed the work – which involved treating everything from corns to calluses – but admits she’d always fantasised about a career in travel. 

“I just love to travel and I find that when I talk about it, I illuminate,” McDonnell tells TTG. “Friends, family and even patients would always be asking for recommendations, some just assuming I’d already been to the destination.” 

An impactful conversation with an older patient, who encouraged McDonnell to travel as much as possible in her youth, only motivated her to explore the idea further.

“We were chatting about travel during the appointment and she gently held my arm and said, ‘My darling, do it while you can’,” she recalls. 

From there, McDonnell vowed to turn her dream into a reality, setting herself the first task of joining a network of professional travel advisors. 

After extensive research, she decided Travel Counsellors was the right agency for her. Although she had never used its services as a client herself, she said she was impressed by its reputation across the industry. 

“Travel Counsellors had great reviews, and when I looked further into them, I found that I aligned with their ethos,” McDonnell says. She went on to attend a Discovery Day at the company’s Manchester headquarters, where she learned more about how the team supports its network of 2,100 agents. 

“They were flexible with hours and provided a lot of help with hotels and leads, and were generally just great fun.” McDonnell will also continue to treat her existing patients; she will not, however, be accepting any more patients as she focuses on her new role. 

Once she had signed up, McDonnell enrolled in Travel Counsellors’ mandatory training programme. The first modules focused heavily on IT, to ensure new advisors understood how to use the company’s intranet and booking systems. 

“I’d been out of using tech for a long time,” admits McDonnell. “When I left the office environment, there was no such thing as email or the internet! It was a bit stressful.”

She persevered with the course, however, spending hours practising on the new software and asking her husband, who works in IT, for assistance when needed. Her education will continue beyond this; all Travel Counsellors complete a six-month onboarding and training programme upon joining. 

While the tech side of things has been challenging for McDonnell, she is confident that her chiropody background will benefit her role as a travel advisor. 

“They’re both very people-facing jobs,” she says. “You need to be genuinely interested in your patients or clients. You need to be able to work out what somebody wants.” 

McDonnell also believes her empathetic nature, which was integral to the success of her footcare clinic, will be equally important in her travel career. 

“I’ve never been a ‘bish, bash, bosh therapist’,” she says. “I get to know my patients really well. Sometimes you’re the only person they’ll see all day.” 

As for her areas of expertise, she is most confident selling the US, especially Florida, as well as Mexico, the Caribbean and the Canary Islands. She hopes to expand her knowledge of cruise, with plans to attend the CLIA conference in May and sail on the Sun Princess – off the recommendation of a fellow TC – that same month. 

McDonnell is also gradually building her client base, having already made bookings for some of her biggest supporters – her patients: “They’ll support you as long as you don’t stop doing their feet!”