Meet Our Travel Designer: Jennifer Crawford

I have a pretty serious case of wanderlust. The kind that has taken me to 47 countries, has me mentally planning the next trip before I’ve unpacked from the last one, and makes the question, “What’s your favorite place you’ve ever been?” nearly impossible to answer. My standard response is, “Wherever I’m going next.” And I really do mean it.

Travel, for me, is about so much more than seeing beautiful places — although I certainly have nothing against a gorgeous view. It’s about discovering how people live in a place completely different from my own. It’s ordering the thing on the menu I’ve never heard of (within reason…let’s remember I’m still a picky eater), figuring out a train system in a language I don’t speak, wandering down a street simply because it looks interesting, and having conversations with people whose lives look nothing like mine. I love the newness of it all. I love that no matter how much of the world I see, there is always, always more.

I’ve now been in the travel industry for 12 years and have owned my own travel business for five, which means I somehow managed to turn the thing I love most into an actual career. I get to listen as people tell me where they dream of going and then figure out how to make that trip even better than they imagined it. I once had someone tell me, “Oh, so you’re a designer, but for travel.” YES. That is exactly it. And I think I really may have the greatest job ever.

I am a traveler first and a travel designer second, and I think that matters. I don’t just want to know which hotel has the prettiest website. I want to know what it feels like to walk out its front door in the morning. Can you wander to a little cafe for coffee? Is there a great restaurant tucked around the corner? Is this the neighborhood where I would want to stay? I want to know how places actually feel because those are the little things that can make the difference between a good trip and one you talk about for the rest of your life.

When I’m not traveling for work, I’m usually trying to figure out how to travel anyway. I have three beautiful kids who have spent their older years knowing that there is a very good chance their mom is currently planning a trip somewhere. And I’m married to a pilot who graciously allows me to explore the world alongside him as he flies internationally — a perk I feel incredibly fortunate for. If there is an empty seat on an airplane headed somewhere interesting, I am rarely going to be the person who says, “No thanks, I think I’ll stay home.”

And once I get there, I want to experience it. I want to eat the gelato, walk the ancient streets, meet the people, find the beautiful view, learn something I didn’t know yesterday and probably take the road that looks just slightly more adventurous. I’ve paraglided in the Swiss Alps, bungee jumped into the Corinth Canal, cliff-dived in France, explored Tuscany from the back of a motorcycle, swung from the bridge over Victoria Falls and wandered off more marked trails than my poor father would probably care to remember. I don’t necessarily need every trip to involve jumping from something tall, but I do need travel to make me feel something.

Maybe that is what I love most about it. Travel makes the world feel enormous and small at exactly the same time. It reminds me how much there is left to discover while showing me how much we all have in common. Forty-seven countries in, I am still fascinated by the differences, still excited by the unfamiliar and still ridiculously happy when I wake up somewhere I’ve never been before.

So, yes, I design travel for a living. But more than that, I get to share something I genuinely love with other people. I get to take all of those places, meals, wrong turns, conversations, adventures and lessons I’ve collected around the world and use them to help someone else experience it in their own way. Twelve years later, I still get excited about every trip.

And I still can’t wait to see where we’re going next.