Two top cruise execs once plotted a different career course

Being a travel agent is one way to turn your interest and passion for travel into a career, but there are others, and a common one is to become a flight attendant.

That career path had great appeal during the 1960s and ’70s, the golden age before deregulation. It was especially true for women, who still faced an uphill battle to enter the business world on an equal footing with men.

So it was striking to me to learn that two of the industry’s top women executives started out with ambitions to become flight attendants, one for Pan Am and another for Delta.

Christine Duffy, president of Carnival Cruise Line, told an audience at Travel Weekly’s CruiseWorld conference in Fort Lauderdale that she made it through to a final interview at Pan Am, only to be informed that she fell short of the 5-foot-4 height requirement.

Turned away by Pan Am, Duffy took a receptionist job at Rosenbluth Travel in Philadelphia.

Dondra Ritzenthaler was also turned down by her first choice, Delta Air Lines, which said she wasn’t the right fit to be a flight attendant there. Ritzenthaler had better luck at American Airlines, where she worked for 20 years, mostly in sales and marketing management, before then-Royal Caribbean president (and former American executive) Jack Williams brought her in to start a sales operation for Celebrity Cruises.

Anyone who knows either woman won’t be surprised that the initial setback didn’t keep them from long-run success. Still, it is interesting to see how the cruise industry has benefited from talent that went unrecognized or unfulfilled elsewhere.

Another example of that is Vicki Freed, Royal Caribbean International’s senior vice president for sales, trade support and services, who set out after college to get hired at IBM or Xerox, then viewed as pinnacle sales organizations.

But along the way Freed took a job at Ask Mr. Foster and wound up hearing a presentation by Bob Dickinson, then the head of sales at Carnival Cruise Line.  As retold by Freed at CruiseWorld, she then went on an elaborate campaign to win a job from Dickinson, which at one point included calling a hotel and pretending to be his secretary in order to get a resume into his hands before Dickinson left Los Angeles.

Again, in retrospect it is easy to see the seeds of success in such early focus and determination. But it could have been put to use elsewhere but for that fateful encounter with Dickinson.

Back when it was new and unrecognized, the cruise industry benefited from the high and sometimes arbitrary standards set by the prestige employers of the day, namely the airlines. The executive talent pool has been, and continues to be, enriched by this phenomenon.