When National Travel Industry Awards winner Sonia Jones took on a school leaver through the Travel Gap pilot, she thought she was giving a young person an opportunity.
What she didn’t expect was for it to completely change the way she thinks about hiring.
Jones, who won Most Outstanding Travel Agency Manager at the 2025 NTIAs, says the biggest difference with Gen Z recruits isn’t technical skill or social media fluency. It’s that they’re arriving into the industry without the trauma, burnout and ingrained habits many long-time travel professionals are still carrying after COVID.
“They just roll with it,” Jones says. “They bring an energy and enthusiasm that a lot of us, if we’re honest, have lost a bit of.”
She’s noticed it in the way younger recruits respond to crises, disruption and uncertainty. Where older consultants instinctively brace for impact when conflict breaks out overseas or travel warnings hit headlines, this cohort simply adapts.
“They’re not in PTSD the minute something flares up overseas,” she says. “They just get on with it. And that matters more than I expected.”
@thetravelgap Meet your 2026 gappers, we’re all so excited to share The Travel Gap experience with you #fyp #travel #atia #thetravelgap #myfirstjob ♬ original sound – The Travel Gap
Jones is the director of Sonia Jones Travel and has built her reputation on precision, service and deep industry knowledge. For years, that meant hiring experienced people who already understood the system.
Then she met Cass Champion.
The queue that sparked a hiring rethink
The conversation happened while waiting in line for the previous year’s NTIA finalist party.
Champion, who runs the Travel Gap pilot alongside Tegan McHugh through My First Job and the Australian Travel Industry Association, started talking to Jones about the industry’s pipeline problem: young people simply don’t know travel exists as a serious career anymore.
“There’s no discussion about travel at school anymore,” Champion says. “When I was young everyone was doing travel and tourism. It was seen as exciting. They’re just not talking about it now.”
What followed wasn’t a rushed internship scheme. Champion and McHugh spent months consulting agencies, wholesalers and operators about what a placement program would actually need to look like to work across businesses of different sizes.
“They didn’t just go, ‘here’s the program, this is what we’re doing’,” Jones says. “Cass and Tegan did a huge amount of work behind the scenes.
“And there’s no magical government grant. This is all done through My First Job, through ATIA and through employers backing it themselves. It’s a huge leap of faith for everyone involved.”
Jones is now on her third placement.
She says she has no intention of going back to recruiting the old way.
A recruitment process designed to filter people out
For a program aimed at school leavers with no industry experience, the Travel Gap pilot is intentionally demanding.
Candidates move through roughly six stages before being placed: questionnaires, itinerary tasks, video submissions, Teams calls they must organise themselves, written instructions they need to follow carefully and strict punctuality requirements.
“If you can’t be bothered, that knocked out a certain percentage straight away,” Champion says. “A lot of amazing candidates didn’t complete certain steps or didn’t follow instructions. That tells you everything.”
Participants also complete DISC profiling and personality testing before placements begin, meaning employers already understand how they communicate and work best.
One of those candidates was 18-year-old Mya Neasey, who recently completed a placement at Sonia Jones Travel.
Sitting alongside Jones during the interview, it’s immediately obvious why she stood out: articulate, confident and unusually self-aware.
“I’m naturally a people person,” Neasey says. “But I didn’t realise how valuable that actually was until I started here and saw how much relationships matter in this industry.”
The travel industry has a branding problem
Ask Neasey what she knew about travel careers before applying and the answer is confronting.
“Unless it’s being a flight attendant, the travel industry really isn’t spoken about,” she says. “I didn’t even know there was a sub-genre of luxury versus corporate.”
Jones believes that’s part of the problem.
For decades, the industry has largely sold itself to young people as one narrow role: sitting at a desk booking holidays.
Meanwhile, students interested in marketing, content, tech, operations, finance or product rarely realise those pathways exist inside travel businesses.
“If you’ve got a passion for marketing, if you love product, if you want to build itineraries but don’t want to do face-to-face selling, there’s wholesale, corporate, tech, finance,” Jones says.
“Even a TAFE cert doesn’t really explain that. It teaches the GDS and calls it a career path.”
Neasey also brought something else into the business: a completely fresh perspective on outdated systems.
The legacy GDS environment, with its coding-heavy interface, immediately struck her as unnecessarily clunky.
“Why would you not use the graphic interface?” she says, laughing. “It just makes so much more sense.”
Jones admits those questions have forced her to rethink processes she’d stopped noticing.
“She’d ask, ‘why are we doing it that way?’ And sometimes I genuinely don’t know. It’s just the way it’s always been done.
“Now I’m asking the same question.”
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‘They learn faster than anyone I’ve trained’
Jones understands why smaller agencies hesitate to hire inexperienced staff. Until recently, she made the same argument herself.
Too much training. Too risky. Too time consuming.
Now she sees it differently.
“They learn at a speed that far surpasses anyone I’ve trained in their 30s, 40s or 50s,” she says. “They’re absolute sponges.”
She laughs recalling one afternoon watching Neasey simultaneously working across a phone, an iPad, her own laptop and Jones’ laptop.
“I genuinely don’t understand it,” she says. “But the agility is extraordinary.”
And while this generation is more willing to question systems and challenge processes, Jones says that’s become one of the biggest benefits.
“Yes, they push back. They’re not apologetic about questioning things. But if they’re willing to learn as well, that’s incredibly valuable.”
What happens next
The Travel Gap pilot hasn’t needed to heavily market its next intake. Employers are already reaching out about participating in 2027. Sponsors have expressed interest. Some schools are beginning discussions around reintroducing travel into curriculum pathways.
“This is purely industry talking and people sharing,” Champion says.
Jones’ next placement started this week and she says her idea of the “perfect hire” has fundamentally shifted.
“Does it have to be a full-time experienced consultant?” she says.
“Or could it be someone with the right passion who consults part-time, does social media, builds itineraries behind the scenes or specialises in another area?
“This has opened up my thinking about what’s actually possible.”
Neasey will attend this year’s NTIAs in Melbourne alongside the rest of the inaugural Travel Gap cohort.
A fitting full-circle moment for a program that started with a conversation in an event queue and is already reshaping how one of Australia’s top agency leaders thinks about the future of travel recruitment.
