Learn how to see the world while you earn with our top 10 jobs that involve travelling.
While salary and benefits are important, there’s more to choosing a career than the number on your pay stub. If you’re happiest when exploring new places, jobs that involve travelling may provide the biggest perks.
Career options like travel agent, cruise director and pilot are obvious choices, but there are plenty of jobs with travel opportunities outside of the travel industry itself.
From sales to accounting, we’ve gathered a few of the top job descriptions for careers that allow you to travel for business.
You don’t need to be a war correspondent to travel the world as a journalist. While some work for local and regional publications and stay within the area, others travel far and wide as part of research for long-form articles and documentaries. A journalist’s job is to gather information and present it to the public in detail, which requires searching for interesting, unique stories across the globe, ideal for anyone searching for careers that allow you to travel.
Gone are the days of door-to-door deals, but corporate sales representative is still a career that requires travel. In this type of role, you could be working for a pharmaceutical, manufacturing, or computing company. You’ll need to showcase the latest products while answering questions and monitoring their use. This not only involves in-person site visits but a high degree of client entertaining to close those deals – sometimes a Zoom call doesn’t cut it. Maintaining long-term relationships with contacts is key to success with this type of job.
Searching for a job that requires travel and pays well? Do you like to be your own boss? Consider becoming a consultant. Management consultants travel domestically and overseas to work at their client’s sites. Their main role is advising, helping other companies streamline processes and make their business run more efficiently. To do this, you’ll be constantly on the move from one client location to another, suggesting and implementing business solutions while maintaining those all-important client relationships.
Like consultants, public relations officers must travel frequently to meet face-to-face with clients and devise PR strategies. Some officers work for big corporate brands, while others work for agencies or freelance as an independent rep. You might manage talent during high-profile product launches or red-carpet events, which makes this an exciting opportunity for someone who loves to travel and thrives in a fast-paced work environment.
Do you love meeting new people and exploring new places? If you’re the life of the party, consider becoming an event manager. This career involves managing corporate events from start to finish, including high-level international conferences and fundraisers. You’ll scout locations and venues, book entertainment and catering services, and monitor the planning process to ensure everything’s delivered on time and within budget.
If you want a job that allows you to travel in the healthcare industry, consider becoming a travel nurse. You’ll make a real impact on people’ lives, while working and living in other countries. Travel nurses move on demand to areas where healthcare’s needed most, including developing countries and disaster relief zones.
Joining the foreign service for your government can be a great choice for people who want to travel and work abroad. Becoming a diplomat drops you right into the heart of another country, where you’ll play an important role acting as a liaison between departments. When it comes to careers and jobs that require international travel, a diplomatic services position is certainly one of the more interesting fields to explore. Duties include everything from handling visa applications to translating treaties. In addition to living abroad as part of your post, you’ll also need to travel between embassies.
Working and travelling is part and parcel of being a retail buyer. As a buyer, you could be scouring the markets of Morocco looking for textiles and colour trends, visiting Italian ateliers to browse the season’s new-in couture, or touring local factories to build relationships with suppliers. Buyers are always on the hunt for fresh, innovative products to bring back to consumers, which involves frequent travel to trade shows and marketplaces.
When you think of jobs that involve travelling, construction management isn’t always on the top of the list. But construction managers oversee residential and commercial projects all over the world, along with energy projects and mining expeditions. Particularly when it comes to commercial projects, these can be vast in scope with sites in multiple cities and countries. A construction manager oversees building sites, monitoring progress and budget requirements, and this requires hands-on, in-person visits. Plus, at the upper end of the salary bracket, international construction manager certainly falls into the category of jobs that require travel and pay well.
Another surprising career that requires travel, at least in some cases, is accounting or auditing. Corporate and financial auditors must tick all the boxes when it comes to investigative paperwork. Auditors spend days, weeks, or even months on location to fully investigate corporate expenditure and prepare financial statements, verifying that internal fraud management controls are sufficient. These services are essential, so clients will pay for expenses as part of corporate travel management.
Although it’s difficult to pinpoint a specific overseas travel job that pays the most with any great accuracy, the jobs that require travel and pay well tend to be Consulting or Enterprise-related. From the jobs listed above, Management Consultant is likely to net you the highest salary, while you should also look out for similar kinds of roles like Business Analyst, Management Analyst, Business Systems Analyst, Strategy Consultant, and so on.
Today’s corporate productivity apps and widespread internet connectivity has led to the rise of the digital nomad. Interested? Let’s find out a little more about a form of employment that’s essentially a job where you can travel practically anywhere, anytime: remote work.
While many remote workers stay at home, it’s also possible to log into work platforms from anywhere with a Wi-Fi connection. A growing number of countries are now offering remote working visas to entice long-term visitors, including European countries like Estonia, Germany, and Portugal as well as Caribbean islands like Bermuda and Barbados.
This opens the doors to working and travelling in a way we’ve never seen before, letting you make money while seeing the world. Of course, this type of lifestyle works best for those who can effectively self-manage and don’t have any ties at home.
Typical remote working careers involve online services, such as graphic design, copywriting, and web development. Online teachers and virtual assistants provide services through digital platforms, maintaining contact with clients through video chats.
At the same time, many overseas travel jobs are industry specific. Working in either the aviation industry or the travel and tourism business comes with perks, often including free travel for friends and family as well as yourself.
There aren’t too many careers where you travel for work that require you to clock more air miles than airplane cabin crew members. Flight attendants get a firsthand experience of business flights. They can travel to multiple cities in a day, providing a high level of customer service while maintaining safety standards aboard each aircraft.
With flight comparison sites and booking engines making it easier than ever to manage business travel, is there still a need for travel agents? Some travellers still prefer the personal service an agent provides, particularly for niche experiences like cruises and safaris, and many agents will visit popular destinations to provide the best advice.
Like journalists, travel writers are natural storytellers documenting their own journeys. They travel to unique or remote locations to share hidden gems and create inspiring itineraries for magazines, newspapers, and online travel websites.
Whether you’re interested in remote work or corporate jobs that involve travelling, here are a few tips to make your CV stand out from the crowd.
Rather than searching for specific job titles, do a little research into companies that frequently advertise jobs involving business travel and match your existing skill set. Then, optimise your search using the right keywords like ‘flexible’, ‘work from anywhere’, ‘travel required’ and ‘freelance’.
If there’s a particular industry you’re most interested in, sign up for networking events. Attending a marketing or tech conference in person will give you a feel for what the job would be like, and you’ll also make vital new contacts that will put you a step ahead of the competition. Use social networks like LinkedIn to stay connected and share your goals. If your network doesn’t know that you’re interested in a career where you travel, they can’t reach out to you with that perfect opportunity!
Not all candidates love to travel, so if you do, make the right first impression. Highlight travel experience in your cover letter and CV, focusing on overseas travel jobs and remote work. If you haven’t had the opportunity to undertake formal business travel just yet, highlight challenges outside of the office.
Gone are the days of settling in one place – travel lovers have more opportunities than ever in today’s interconnected world. You’ll find jobs and careers that allow you to travel across different industries, from retail to event planning to pharmaceutical sales, ensuring there’s something to meet your interests.
Of course, along with the perks of business travel comes the need to keep on top of expenses, booking and itineraries, and this is where a good corporate travel management system comes in. With a unified platform like Booking.com for Business, you can manage all the finer details in one place, leaving you free to enjoy all those new experiences associated with jobs that require international travel.
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