In 2012, Lila Fox walked away from a stable career as a civil and environmental engineer and into an industry few of her former colleagues would have predicted: luxury travel.
The decision wasn’t as impulsive as it might sound. The reality behind it was that after spending a decade in engineering, Fox was simply burned out.
She’d chosen the profession for security rather than for passion or pleasure. Having grown up in a poor part of southern Louisiana she was determined to build a life where she could always support herself.
While engineering offered stability, what she had begun to realize was that it didn’t offer satisfaction, gratification, or more plainly put, contentment.
“I was doing something that butted up against my innate abilities,” she said during a video call with Luxury Travel Advisor in January.
The work was draining not because she lacked discipline, but rather because it required her to work against her natural strengths.
Although she’d climbed quickly up the corporate ladder, said yes to everything, and made increasingly costly sacrifices, she finally saw that the next step meant managing more people — a role she already knew she did not enjoy.
Amidst this inner turmoil travel was her creative outlet, and it was photography and writing that filled an emptiness that seemed to fester in her day job.
It was about 2011 when a former university friend working in the travel industry reached out after noticing Fox’s eye for travel imagery on social media.
The industry, her friend described, was changing — an older generation was retiring, and there was room for younger voices, as well as for growth.
Within a few months, Fox began mapping out an exit from engineering and a transition into travel — speaking with industry contacts, researching host agencies, and making preparations to rebuild her career around something that felt natural rather than forced.
Then she had made the leap.
Baptism by Fire
Right after making the leap in 2012, Fox joined SmartFlyer, entering the industry as one of its early independent contractors. Based in New Orleans at the time while the agency operated out of New York, she built her business largely on her own initiative.
The arrangement was relatively informal by today’s standards — her agreement reportedly fit on a single page, and she was responsible for finding and managing her own clients.
It was, in her words, something of a “baptism by fire.” She observed and modeled successful advisors within the agency and relied on the business acumen she had developed while she was in engineering.
Rather than being hand-held into the profession, she learned quickly, independently, and with the discipline of someone who had already managed complex projects and high-stakes responsibilities.
Today, she runs a boutique luxury travel agency based in Denver, Colorado, operating as a direct member of Virtuoso after leaving her host agency in 2019.
While she has billionaire clients, she also has something rather scarce in the high-touch, high-pressure world of luxury travel: a profitable business that does not consume her life.
The wellness sector is already a $3 trillion dollar industry, and that will increasingly overlap with luxury travel as some projections for wellness exceed $9 trillion globally by 2030, according to the Global Wellness Institute.
The industry’s growth reflects a broader shift toward preventative health, mental wellbeing, lifestyle design, and of course that buzziest of wellness buzzwords: longevity.
Yet inside the travel trade itself, Fox argues that conversations about advisor wellbeing remain muted at best.
“Everybody wants to know how to grow, how to make more money,” she notes, “but few people ask, ‘How much is enough?’”
Striking the Balance
For Fox, burnout in travel does not begin with an increase in clients or the volume of requests.
The initial symptom, she explains, begins with losing track. Many advisors, she notes, do not know what they actually need to earn to sustain their households.
Instead, they chase arbitrary revenue milestones without clarity on profitability or personal financial targets based on the success, real or perceived, of their fellow advisors, such as the coveted $1 million in annual sales.
“If more people had a basic understanding of what they needed to bring into their household regardless of what the next advisor is bringing into their household, I think we would see less burnout,” she says.
Her own turning point came when her host agency grew beyond recognition. What began as a small, close-knit group started to expand rapidly. Milestones kept rising, and goalposts kept moving.
Fox was a top producer, yet she felt the pressure to hire, scale, and manage a team rather than remain a solo advisor.
It was something that felt like a nostalgic pang from her engineering days, and she knew that path would lead her back into a role she had already rejected.
The agency had grown into something impressive, but it was no longer something she felt part of.
So, she chose to leave and build her own agency, buttressed by plenty of what she commonly refers to as “guard rails.”
They are boundaries that are as specific as they are explicit.
For example, her phone does not go to bed with her. It doesn’t sit on the dinner table, and if a client requires 24/7 access, she tells them she is not the right advisor, and her policies are clearly written into her terms and conditions.
When asked if she’d ever entertained the retainer model, she firmly replies, “I don’t like the idea of being owned by a client.”
Sleep, she insists, is foundational. Without it, everything cascades.
“If you’re not sleeping well, you’re probably not eating well, not exercising, not spending time with friends and family,” she remarks.
For Fox, those guard rails are what protect her routine — a structure that she’s designed to also protect her mental health.
Another important part of that is choosing clients carefully, with kindness as a central pillar. More specifically: kindness to the advisor, to the advisor’s in-country partners and hoteliers, and kindness to those who the traveler encounters during their trip.
“I don’t think that kindness and money are mutually exclusive. I think you can be kind and have money. And I think there are people that are unkind with money,” she says.
Scaling Back to Scale Up
Before the pandemic, she was already starting to pull back. She had more clients than she needed and was earning more than she personally required.
When Covid hit, the leaner structure of her business proved to be resilient. By the time things began to open back up in 2022, she’d recorded her best revenue year yet.
For Fox, luxury is defined simply as the ability to do what you love in a way that flows naturally.
The industry might be fixated on growth curves and leaderboard rankings, but to keep all the noise at bay her model is less about expansion and more about ensuring that interests are aligned — with business partners and clients.
As wellness becomes a multi-trillion-dollar global business, Fox’s story suggests that the most urgent frontier may not be new spa openings or biohacking retreats.
Instead, it could be the mental health of the advisors designing those journeys, and their capacity to service their clients in a meaningful and sustainable way.
Jacques Ledbetter is a Luxury Travel Advisor contributor and founder of The Luxe Ledger newsletter.
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