Cheryl Hayward-Chew has gone from dispensing for customers' medical needs to booking their holidays in what has proved to be both an interesting and varied career.

Having qualified as a pharmacist and dispensed medicine for 10 years, she then decided on a career change and followed in her father Henry Hayward's footsteps into the travel agency industry.

Now as the president of corporate development and travel at Meyer-Franklin Travel, Ms Hayward-Chew is running the show, heading one of Bermuda's top high street travel agencies.

Ms Hayward-Chew got her first taste of travel as a youngster at the Meyer Group, one of the Island's first travel agents, before going to study pharmacy at Massachusetts College of Pharmacy in the US and embarking on a career in pharmacy which took her to Woodbourne Chemists, Bermuda Pharmacy and Collector's Hill Apothecary.

During her time in pharmacy, she became a manager at one of the stores and decided to try her hand working in the travel industry at Meyer, never looking back since.

"I was actually a pharmacist when I started out for 10 years," Ms Hayward-Chew said. "Somewhere in those 10 years I became a manager of a pharmacy and once you do that it is hard to go back.

"To me a company is no different with all the processes it goes through, whether it be a pharmacy or a travel agent."

When she joined Meyer in 1997 the company was going through a big period of transition and upheaval which needed to be sorted out by management, but she was not afraid to pitch in and help out, progressing on to the role of development manager in 2001.

"I thought 'How can I make it better?'" said Ms Hayward-Chew. "There were a lot of changes going on at Meyer and I thought I could actually help my father, which would make more sense in the long-term because I was good at this sort of thing and could keep the company growing. He asked if I was interested and I said yes.

"From that I have worked on different areas of the company, but ultimately I defaulted to travel because that was an area which has gone through a number of changes."

In 2002 Ms Hayward-Chew was involved in the merger of Meyer and Franklin Travel, which was founded by Buddy Franklin in 1981, to form Meyer-Franklin, going on to become a 30-strong team of travel consultants that it is today.

"Between 2000 and 2004 was when travel finally started focusing on thriving rather than survival," she said. "We merged Meyer and Franklin Travel, but anybody that has been through a merger knows it is difficult to get two different cultures to come together.

"Ultimately in the end I was more responsible for travel and it has been a fantastic training ground, as travel is the perfect example of how a business needs to operate."

Ms Hayward-Chew, who comes from St. George's, became vice-president of corporate development and travel in 2003 after the merger was completed. This year she took over the role of president, succeeding her father, who has been in the business for 57 years since the age of 16, as he focused on his duties as CEO. Aside from the travel side of the business, she has also been active in the company's shipping, freight and property concerns.

One of the highlights during her time in at the company was actually dealing with the difficult times of the merger and turning it into a positive and learning from the whole experience.

Meyer-Franklin, which was voted Best Travel Agency for 2006 in Bermudian Business, offers both holiday and business travel, as well as American Express travel services, and Vacation Finder, to help customers identify their perfect holiday.

But during her career in travel, Ms Hayward-Chew, 44, has been there and seen it all, from the dark days following 9/11 to the Iraq War and even the SARS virus to happier times when the industry has recently started to show some signs of recovery.

"Right now it is about the airlines and the fact that fuel costs so much," she said. "At the moment with all the airlines we are all sitting and waiting to see what happens — they are going to have to change how they work.

"We all assume that inevitably the price of travel is going to go up."

She pointed to the fuel surcharges being added to customers' tickets and getting Schengen visas, which allow visitors to enter the countries of the European Union, and visas to Russia and China as the main issues facing her company and the travel industry as a whole at the moment.

On top of that, its market share for the irregular leisure traveller is steadily decreasing as they choose to book online instead, according to Ms Hayward-Chew.

"We have to be the best, we have to be the machines on line and have an online alternative," she said. "We have to do better than what the computers and outside US agencies provide.

"On the other side we are finding that the demand is increasing for corporate travel — it is more efficient to go to the travel agent than booking on line."

One of the more controversial travel websites to hit the market of late was Your TravelBiz.com, against which California Attorney General Edmund Brown filed a lawsuit to shut it down last month. He alleged YTB was a "gigantic pyramid scheme" that recruited tens of thousands of members with deceptive claims that members could earn huge sums of money through its online travel agencies.

Ms Hayward-Chew admitted that while she is not against people wanting to become travel agents, the real agent is the website and those recruited to it rarely win financially.

"There are people who have signed up and they have always wanted to be a travel agent," she said. "When someone knows that you are from a 'bricks and mortar' travel agency, suddenly they think you are against it, but that is not simply the case.

"I have no problem with people who want to do things for the better, but I do have a problem with people who fork out $400 to $500 and are going to get little or no return on it — it all comes down to whether you want the safety of having your money in a known travel agency or not."

Like all good travel agents, Ms Hayward-Chew, who has a husband and two children, enjoys nothing better than travelling the world when she is not busy working or looking after her family, having been to North America, the Caribbean and Europe.

Among her favourite holidays was a Mediterranean cruise last Christmas, where she dropped in on Malta. But her dream destinations would be Argentina and Brazil.