Carmen Bold has had dozens of career conversations with tourism professionals over the past few months, every one of them either looking for a new role or weighing up their next move. She asked all of them the same question: why now? Not a single person said money. What came back instead was feeling undervalued, being close to burnout, and working somewhere whose values no longer matched their own.

That's the thread running through this episode, and it took Ged somewhere he wasn't expecting.

Carmen has spent twenty-five years in tourism and events across Australia and New Zealand, from frontline reservations to destination management, and she now hosts the Tourism Matters podcast with a focus on careers and workforce. In this conversation she and Ged get into why most tourism jobs are filled through networks long before they reach a job board, why the human side of travel may be more resistant to AI than we tend to assume, and what destinations and businesses can actually do to hold on to seasonal workers rather than starting from scratch every year.

For years Ged has treated seasonality as a marketing problem. Carmen reframes it as a workforce strategy, and once you see it that way it's hard to look at it any other way again. Keep the season going, and you keep your people.

She also shares the retention maths that should make every seasonal employer sit up. A worker who returns the following year effectively halves your recruitment.

Links:
Carmen Bold on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/carmen-bold/
Carmen's website: https://www.carmenbold.com
The Tourism Matters podcast:
The State of Tourism Seasonality Report, out now