A Nurse’s Journey into Travel Planning : Jupiter Travel Influencer

Article by: John Pacenti
Photography by: Carri Lager

In the stressful world of healthcare, Jupiter resident Patricia Schickling finds solace in an unexpected passion: travel planning.

By day, she works as a nurse at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Riviera Beach. By night and on weekends, she transforms into a travel agent with LuxRally Travel, crafting dream vacations for clients seeking adventure beyond hospital walls.

Photo by Carri Lager

Travel advisor Trish Schickling was inspired to join the industry after a disastrous family trip to Orlando. As for the benefits, she points out that working with an agent can get you access to extra perks only available to insiders.

“Everyone's happy when they're planning a trip,” the Syracuse, N.Y., native said. “You know, it's not like healthcare, where everyone's a bit sad or scared and apprehensive about what's going on.”

For Schickling, taking off her nurse’s hat and putting on her travel visor is a way of coping with a hard job providing medical care for veterans.

“My travel agent business is still growing. It's kind of starting as a side business,” she said.

It may very well have been a trip from hell that got Schickling thinking how crucial a travel advisor can be to a successful trip. It all happened in that Alice in Wonderland haze that we all experienced during the pandemic.

The Schicklings decided a jaunt to a well-known Orlando hotel water park was the ticket, where they had booked a family suite.

“We got there and the room was dirty,” she said. “The bathroom had hair all over it. We found crumbs on the couch. So we opened it up and there was a bunch of Goldfish crackers crushed up inside of it – plus a dirty diaper.”

Schickling, who goes by Trish, then had a thought: If she had used a travel agent rather than a travel website, then all the horror could have been avoided.

Like so many travellers before and since, Schickling thought she had landed a great deal through an online travel site with water park passes. She kept thinking how her two kids were going to love it.

“We got there, and the waterpark wasn’t operating. It was just the pool.”

Feeling like a real-life Clark Griswold at the gates of Walley World, Schickling schlepped the family to another hotel and spent hours being transferred from person to person trying to get her refund from that online travel site.

When she thought about it later, Schickling said, “This would have been a whole lot easier had I booked it with a travel agent – and we would have been a whole lot less stressed.

Fast forward, now Schickling is that very professional working through the LuxRally Travel agency. Have you ever just kind of planned a trip to relieve stress? Rather than sit in front of the television, Schickling would conjure up dream vacations.

“My husband (Erik) kind of made a joke that I should be a travel agent, because I would spend a lot of my free time just planning trips or looking at trips and dreaming about different trips to take,” Schickling said.

“He said you should just do that and get paid for it. I'm like, ‘You know what? Let's see if we can make that work.’”

Schickling, here at Coco Cay in the Bahamas, uses her own travel experience, as well as industry connections, to find travelers the best options to fit their needs. And she can step in if travelers experience problems or delays.

And indeed this Renaissance mom/nurse/wife/travel agent has done just that.

“A lot of my clients lately have been more of a domestic kind of travel, but I can do international travel, as well. I did just book a honeymoon couple,” she said.

“They're going to Paris and then Cancun, so they're kind of splitting up the stay a bit, and I was able to coordinate.”

Shickling wants to dispel the notion that a travel agent is a relic of the past due to those very internet sites.

They are also not an added expense. It’s not just the fictional White Lotus that has relationships with travel agents.

“A lot of hotels actually have special partnerships with travel agents and they offer clients of travel agents a few extra perks,” Schickling said. “A lot of times, you can pay for a standard room and get upgraded to a deluxe room.”

Don’t like hotels or resorts? Schickling has the resources to book vacation properties or villas.

And if something goes sideways (think flight delays, lost luggage), there is the travel agent to fix the problem, not somebody in a phone room at Expedia.com. The difference with partnering with a travel agent versus an online travel site is akin to having a concierge doctor compared to a walk-in clinic.

Scheckling said lately she has worked with a lot of local parents who are looking to travel domestically for their children’s extracurricular sports. They don’t call them travel teams for nothing.

“Baseball, yeah, it's a big thing. And people are traveling farther than you think,” she said. “A lot of teams are going up into Georgia. They're going into Alabama.”