Posts by: Dawn Rainbolt

Dawn has always had a great love of travelling and adventure. As a child, she traversed the US in a camper with her family, went hiking in the mountains and swimming at her family’s cabin in West Virginia. As a student, she decided to do something unique: spend a summer living with a host family in Costa Rica to work as an English teacher at a local orphanage and explore the jungle on weekends. This experience, as well as a semester studying abroad in the UK, broadened her view of the world and inspired her desire to live, work and travel abroad, as well as learn foreign languages (such as French, Spanish plus a spattering of Polish and Russian).

After graduating, she moved to Spain where she obtained a TEFL degree and taught English at an academy in a village near Valencia. Because of a desire to experience Eastern Europe while discovering family roots, she moved to Poland for a year to work as a preschool English teacher. While in Warsaw, she was able to not only travel the whole of Poland and dig deep into Polish culture, she was able to visit surrounding nations in the Baltics, Central and Eastern Europe, even a little of the Balkans. Always looking for adventure off the beaten path, she has also visited places such as Iceland, Norway and Russia as a solo traveller. She loves anything from cycling to hiking to grape picking to cultural immersion.

These travels made her realize that the tourism sector was her perfect match. She moved to Lyon, France in order to do her Masters Degree in International Marketing and Global Tourism in a bilingual (French-English) program at the INSEEC business school.

She has also spent time working for other trade organisations, including the Passenger Vessel Association where she managed her own column. She collaborated with the Textile Rental Services Association, where she worked with the editorial team as well as managing the ‘New Product’ and ‘Back in Time’ columns, and visited several plants in America and Europe to conduct on-site interviews and write feature articles.

Based in Lyon, she is currently working with ATTA to expand their European operations and presence while sharing her passion for travel and tourism to attract ever-larger numbers of visitors hungry for adventurous experiences.