Juliet Moss-Solomom takes travel higher

Juliet Moss-Solomon is on the phone taking information from a friend she had not heard from for about six months. The friend is stuck in Miami and needs help getting on a flight back to Jamaica.

Her bright hazel eyes light up when her secretary, Sophia Belnavis, ushers me into her cozy office.

Her greeting is warm and genuine: “Hi, welcome.” And, with the phone still at her ear she half whispers: I’ll be just a minute — long distance.” She starts writing again. “Okay, don’t worry about it. We’ll take care of it for you,” she finally says, then hangs up.

Immediately, she calls Belnavis (her arms and legs, she says) and passes on the information, asking her to make the travel arrangements for the friend. Actually, if I hadn’t been there for this interview, Moss-Solomon would probably have made the arrangements herself. Because that is her nature — an attribute that actually won her many clients during her early years as a travel agent. For, it was not uncommon to see Moss-Solomon going to the Passport Office for her clients or accompanying them to the American Embassy and helping them through the various visa pre-interview stages. “Those places were my stomping ground,” she says.

These days Moss-Solomon, the chairman and managing director of Compact Travel Agency Ltd, does not get enough time to do a lot of that for her clients. But she would never, she says, turn down a request.

In fact, Moss-Solomon has taken service to a higher level, travelling overseas, at her own cost, to inspect hotels and attractions before recommending them to her clients.

For instance, in July this year she went to Manchester, England on a familiarisation trip. Why?

“Well, the Commonwealth Games are being held there next year,” she explains, “so I went there to find out what the place was like.”

Last year, months before the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney, Australia, Moss-Solomon flew to that continent to get a first-hand look at hotels and attractions and was on a flight back home in two days.

“I brought back a lot of brochures, because a lot of people were going to travel there, and when you are able to hand them a booklet to say this is what you need to read, it really does help,” she says.

A trip to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia three years ago was simply to achieve the same goal — ensure that the hotel she was recommending to her clients was suitable.

“I’ve learnt that in this business you have to be proactive,” Moss-Solomon says.

“I don’t think people understand how intricate a travel agent’s job is. There are some of us who think that travel is about writing a Kingston/Miami/Kingston or a Kingston/New York/Kingston ticket. It’s way above that. It’s things like visa requirements, booking hotels, booking cars, you name it, it’s doing that and you pretty much have to try and keep abreast of everything that comes in to you,” she says.

The job, Moss-Solomon admits, is tough, but hard work is nothing new to her because she has been pushing herself since she started working in the travel industry 20 years ago after teaching at Mannings High School and Belair.

“I’ve always loved travel. So I applied for a job at Grace, Kennedy Travel,” says Moss-Solomon who is actually from Savanna-la-Mar but was living in Mandeville at the time. Her reason for choosing that firm was because her then husband (now deceased) was working with Grace. But when she went for the interview in Kingston, she was turned down on the basis that she had no experience.

“Then, Marcia Lewis-Hamilton, someone with whom I grew up in the Savanna-la-Mar Baptist Church, said to her bosses, how do you expect this lady to get experience if nobody will hire her?”

That apparently swayed the then general manager at Grace, Kennedy Shipping, Junior Cox, who recalled her for an interview, hired her and assigned her to Grace Travel at Heritage House.

“I worked hard, I really worked hard,” says Moss-Solomon. Not one phone call missed me, not one request that was made by anybody, whether they called or walked in, was never pursued aggressively.”

Her assiduousness was noticed, and at the end of her first year, she was the top junior agent for all Grace Travel branches.

She was then placed in sales and sent on the road, a job she did and thoroughly enjoyed for 16 years. “I guess they saw something that I never knew I had, which was the sales techniques,” he reasons.

Like in most other industries, travel sales people tend to know each other. And the ones who spark, most naturally, are usually known by almost everyone. So, it was hardly surprising when, in 1989, Moss-Solomon was offered the sales manager position at Martins Travel.

She grabbed the opportunity with both hands and worked at that firm for nine years until she was approached to buy the majority shares in Compact Travel.

“At first I wasn’t interested, because I really wanted to go help my husband in his business. But then, I eventually met with the owners and decided to look at it,” she says.

The price for a stake in the company was almost $2 million. She thought about the money she had put aside for her older son’s college education, but decided that it would not be touched and went about getting half of the investment, as agreed with Compact’s owners.

To acquire the other half, she saved like mad — near every cent of her salary, her pension, and also sold her car.

“I’m a saver. I learnt this from my mom, who ran a shop, that’s how she got my brother and I through college. Hard work. I’ve never met a woman who works as hard as her,” she says.

Her other task during that first year was to get the company running as professionally as possible. “It was not just working in terms of making the company viable. It was working in terms of getting the company that I had bought into to a standard that was acceptable to me in terms of the service level, accountability, staff morale and staff benefits; basically just putting things in place,” she explains.

Amid all that, she went about getting in touch with her clients to let them know that she had changed addresses. That experience is indelibly planted in her mind as, according to her, although she had resigned from Martins and given them a month’s notice, they asked her to leave immediately and declined, when her clients called, to tell them where she had gone.

“I was very hurt and crushed when it happened. But, I guess it’s business and maybe because of the job I had, being the sales manager, knowing every client pretty much intimately, knowing what they like and dislike.”

The following year, when she had raised the balance of the payment, Moss-Solomon, with the help of her attorney at the time, Michael Hylton, who is now the solicitor-general, inked the deal that gave her 55 per cent of the company.

According to Moss-Solomon, at the time she bought into Compact, it was not among the top 10 travel agencies in Jamaica in terms of sales. She, however, had a vision of where the firm could be taken and was up to the challenge. Plus, the property on which it sat at Hillcrest Avenue off Hope Road, had good parking, the building was pleasant and the company was equipped with Sabre and Trams computer systems.

Sabre, she explains, is used by the majority of the travel industry and makes travel planning much easier. “You pretty much can pull up almost any flight in the world on this system, as well as hotels, car rentals, cruise ships, once they subscribe to Sabre. It’s endless,” she says.

The system also allows travel agents the luxury of auto printing tickets. “You don’t write tickets anymore unless you have a power cut,” says Moss-Solomon.

Trams, she explains, is an accounting system that agents use to keep track of their clients’ travel activity. For instance, a client’s name is entered in the system and it tells how many tickets that client has ever bought from the agent and on which airline.

So, armed with these equipment, staff, which she describes as “excellent”, and a convenient location, Moss-Solomon and her team set about capturing their share of the travel market.

Today, Compact, boasting new offices at 22 Belmont Road in New Kingston, is generating sales that have placed them as the number two agency for British Airways, number three for American Airlines and BWIA and within the top 10 for Air Jamaica.

Compact’s sales accomplishments have won them the respect of their peers and, no doubt, admiration from the airlines.

“Juliet is a go-getter who seeks out business opportunities and seizes them,” says Marcia Erskine, a public relations consultant who handles British Airways’ account in Jamaica.

Erskine describes Moss-Solomon as “persistent, innovative, tenacious and proactive — a real live wire. In other words, she’s no booking agent.”

Moss-Solomon herself will tell you that she’s a hard taskmaster who believes that there should be dignity in labour. “I respect people putting pride in their job, no matter what it is.”

Her mother, who she describes as her hero, gets the credit for Moss-Solomon’s drive and business acumen.

Over the three years it took her to develop the travel agency, and even before her Compact days, Moss-Solomon rued the limited contact she had with her family because of the job’s demands.

Today, however, she’s making time to enjoy her family. Her mom, Valda Sinclair, now lives with her, her husband, Owen and two sons — Cornel, 20 and David, seven. Her 25 year-old daughter, Angelique (her first husband’s child), is now married.

Moss-Solomon says she has also resumed her charitable work with United Way and will work with the tourism arm of that organisation. “There’s a lot we can do and it’s not about just giving money,” she says.