Faces of the Industry
Have Mission - Will Travel I just started getting to a place where I needed more balance in my life, and I wanted to find something else that I was passionate about.”
TEXT BY: NICK PATTERSON // PHOTO BY: JOE DE SCIOSCE PHOTOS COURTESY: LISA HARRIS BOYD
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t the Southern Automotive Conference Lisa Harris Boyd serves as the stage manager, and earlier this year she was somewhere in the middle of the three day event being held in Nashville, Tennessee when she got a call in the middle of the night. Actually, she got two calls. One was from Dubai. The other was from London, England. Both were emergencies and neither had anything to do with the Southern Automotive Conference, although they both were transportation related. One call was from a woman in 46 | Southern Automotive Alliance / WINTER 2020
Dubai who had broken her foot and needed to be transported back to the U.S. The other call was from a couple traveling in London, on their way by train to Paris, who needed to fly back to America because of a family emergency. The reason they called Boyd? In her regular job — the one she does between the annual editions of the Southern Automotive Conference — Boyd owns and operates Life Is Short Adventures, a Birmingham, Alabamabased travel planning and consulting business. The emergency calls were from clients who she had set up for
dream getaways, trips that suddenly threatened to turn into nightmares — in the middle of the night here in the States. But did that throw Boyd? Nope. Not even at 2 a.m. “So, the client in London…I had to cancel her train trip – or attempted to cancel her train trip – I cancelled her hotel, everything. She was leaving to go to Paris so I cancelled all of her Paris activities and got her on the next flight out of London to come home because her mother-in-law had gotten admitted to the hospital and the family was called to come home,” Boyd relates. “Thankfully I had offered her travel insurance and she had accepted it, so all of the expenses and all of the cancelled things …were all refundable because of the travel insurance. But I had to work that night to get her home and cancel as many things as I could.” The client in Dubai with the broken foot turned out to have less of an immediate need to get out of the country, Boyd says. “She ended up staying another couple of days. But that’s another benefit of having a travel advisor work with you is that when those emergencies come up, you don’t have to worry about it, you just kind of sit back and let somebody else deal with the stress of taking care of all those details.” Boyd took it all in stride. “It was from 2-4 a.m. I was dealing with the travel emergencies, and then 6 a.m. I had to wake up for the SAC to be there by 7,” she says, laughing at the memory. “But it was great. Still it was fine. I wasn’t even sleepy that day…I guess I
