Katelyn O'Shaughnessy, a TV reporter-turned-travel agent and tech entrepreneur, is a poster child for the kinds of opportunities the industry holds for high-energy millennials with a passion for travel. An agent for just two years, she has already been named a Travel + Leisure Rising Star.
Just as impressively, she has designed an itinerary app called TripScope, first using funding from her grandmother, then winning $100,000 in a crowd-funding competition. TripScope landed her in PhoCusWright's "Class of 35 travel tech innovators under 35."
Her co-founder and chief technical officer, Peter Kellis, is a former Google product manager and software architect who holds 25 patents. Today, about three months after it launched, 1,200 agents are already using TripScope.
A broadcast journalism major, O'Shaughnessy went straight from college into TV, working first for a Fox affiliate and then moving to radio.
She discovered her true love, travel, through her roommate's older brother, who sold luxury travel. O'Shaughnessy, who said she hadn't realized anyone used travel agents anymore, loved hearing his stories about the business.
"That sounds like my dream job," she remembers thinking. But the older brother warned her it was a tough business to break into, and he was right. Agencies ignored her job applications.
Undeterred, she made a business card identifying herself as an agent and crashed trade events.
She worked the crowd, trying to find out what it was that agencies were looking for in new employees, then tailored her resume accordingly. She kept hearing about one agency in particular: TravelStore, based in Los Angeles.
O'Shaughnessy pestered the agency relentlessly, sending in her resume weekly and praising their operation in her cover letters. "I heard you guys were the best," she would write, along with offering to upgrade their website and to run a social media campaign for them.
Her weekly applications first got only a polite "Thank you, we have no position available." But TravelStore CEO Wido Schaefer liked her persistence.
"Her positive and convincing attitude got her the job," he recalled recently.
O'Shaughnessy leapt into her new career with enthusiasm. Her mentor at TravelStore, Susanne Hamer, said that honeymoons and weddings were a natural for a millennial, because it's much easier for young couples to work with a contemporary than someone "who's the age of their mother."
O'Shaughnessy set up booths at bridal shows throughout Los Angeles. She searched Facebook for couples planning weddings or honeymoons. She hosted Twitter chats for the Knot and other bridal sites and publications.
"You have to be engaging and sound credible," she said, stressing the importance of being professional but friendly, happy to answer questions and willing to give free advice about the best romantic places.
Honeymoons led to referrals from the bridal couples' parents and friends.
But O'Shaughnessy thought that one part of her new career was unnecessarily laborious: having to create complex, multi-source FIT itineraries from scratch in a Microsoft Word document.
That led to her idea for TripScope, her travel itinerary app for iPhones and iPads.
TripScope creates a repository of itineraries that agents in the same agency can share, a sort of institutional brain.
The staff fine-tunes the itinerary on the agent-facing website TripScopeApp.com. Its auto-assist feature enables agents to email reservations to TripScope, which will create a digital itinerary for them. Large agencies or consortia can embed information, amenities and photos of their preferred hotel partners into TripScope. It holds city guides as well as granular details such as the locations of an Italy specialist's favorite gelato shops in Rome.
TripScope then pushes the itinerary to clients' handhelds. TripScope includes push notification support so clients can ask their agents to change their itinerary midtrip if necessary.
"It gives clients peace of mind so that if anything goes wrong, we can connect," O'Shaughnessy said. An agent can change the hotel, update that information on TripScopeApp.com, and TripScope automatically updates it on the clients' handheld. The app holds static maps customized to the client's trip so they never have to go online.
Clients can post directly to social media sites from the app, and the post includes a hyperlink to the agent's own URL, making it a referral and marketing tool, as well.
"It's a new way that agents can show their relevance in today's techie world," O'Shaughnessy said.
Agents can deploy TripScope as a white label product, branding it with their own name.
Finding a co-developer required some ingenuity. "Lucky for me, I live in Santa Monica," she said.
She heard about a hackathon — a collaborative event for software developers — being held a few blocks from her house. She attended, pitched her idea to any programmer who would listen and found a group of programmers who thought TripScope was a great idea. After devoting a marathon 48 hours nonstop, the group ended up with an app that made it to the hackathon's Top 10.
O'Shaughnessy continued her bootstrap operation, taking classes in computer coding and networking to find partners. Her grandmother, Rosemary Fosse, was an early financial backer. The two had always been close, talking to each other at least once a day.
"We call her our 'wild hare'," Fosse said recently when describing her granddaughter's creative and unconventional ways.
Then, in September, O'Shaughnessy won $100,000 in Crowdfunder and Social Media Week LA's CrowdfundxLA pitching competition.
"It was all boys; I was the only girl," O'Shaughnessy recalled, and the "boys" with whom she was competing all worked for companies like Facebook, Google and Ycombinator, a top incubator.
"Here I was, a travel agent, and I ended up winning it."
Follow Kate Rice on Twitter @krtravelweekly.