Global travel, from one office in Napier since 1971 - Danielle Caldwell and team leader Maureen Halbert (right), who says: "We're both the boss." Photo / Warren Buckland
Global travel, from one office in Napier since 1971 - Danielle Caldwell and team leader Maureen Halbert (right), who says: "We're both the boss." Photo / Warren Buckland
When the two staff at Hellowworld Travel in Napier started moving camp Danielle Caldwell could not unkindly be described as being part of the furniture.
She was there on the ground floor Dunvegan House, on the corner of Hastings and Station streets, when the office opened as Hawke's Bay's headoffice of domestic airline NAC just days after the building opened 51 years ago, and she was there when the doors closed on Thursday.
As it happens she's also back on deck just down the road, where Helloworld Travel has relocated to a Civic Court site, also on Station St, and has no plans to retire, despite more than 50 years in the travel industry, including the couple of years of pandemic stress in which cancelling people's fares at times seemed almost as common as booking them.
Almost all of it has been in the one building, having worked for legal firm Langley Twigg for two years after finishing at Napier Girls High School and starting with NAC (National Airway Corporation) in September 1971, just two weeks after the four-storey Dunvegan House was opened.
She then went to domestic and international carrier Air New Zealand (which was formed after the merger of state-owned flyers NAC and TEAL), and most recently with the now-franchised Helloworld.
Travel professional Danielle Caldwell and Napier's Dunvegan House travel corner where she's worked for most of the last 51 years. Photo / Warren Buckland
She did take flight to another travel agency in town for about three years, but true to the nature of the industry did return, and she had time off to start raising three children.
Of course there's also been plenty of travel around the globe in the interests of first-hand knowledge of the destinations to which she was directing and booking the customers.
They would be saddled with travel satchel and wallets of itineraries and handwritten tickets, gleaned from globes, maps and folders of schedules, now condensed at a few swivels of a cursor and clicks of the finger often to little more than an email or a QR code or bar code on a cellphone.
Amid one of Napier's wettest weeks in her half-century, she glances around the corner-profiled office remembering the seats she's filled over the years, and the sun-filled travels she's booked, she said: "I just loved flying. I thought I might be an air hostess."
Now in the office, there's just herself and Maureen Halbert, the "team leader", who says: "We're both the boss."
The Covid-19 crisis changed life for everyone, but particularly those who travel and those in the travel industry, but, now with six grandchildren and often a weekly babysitting and Saturday-morning sports schedule as complex as some of the best of itineraries, she said: "I'm just happy in the job. I'm not looking at wanting to give up yet."
Meanwhile, the vacated Dunvegan House corner will become office space for the Napier City Council, alongside its service centre in the same building and just across the road from the Civic Buildings which had to be vacated in haste amid an earthquake risk assessment more than four years ago.
