A vacation is sold twice. First comes the imagined version: the blue water, the balcony breakfast, the children temporarily forgetting their screens. Then comes the real thing, with a room key, a reservation and the quiet hope that reality will honor the brochure. Jeff Myers has spent his career managing the territory between those two sales. At Travel + Leisure Co., his brief carries an executive title, but its essential problem is wonderfully plain: how do thousands of people deliver a promise that still feels personal?
Myers is Chief Sales and Marketing Officer for the company's Vacation Ownership business and a member of its executive committee. His map covers the United States, Canada, Mexico and the Caribbean. His responsibilities cross sales strategy, marketing programs, training and development, then keep going into the practical borderlands shared with business development, operations and finance. Hospitality likes a graceful lobby. The machinery behind it is less photogenic: staffing plans, lead flow, conversion, training, financing and the repeated handoff from interest to experience.
He knows that machinery from the ground up. Myers joined the business in 1991, when the company lineage ran through Fairfield Resorts. He was named Rookie of the Year that same year. It is a cinematic first line, although the more revealing story is everything that followed: site leader, vice president across multiple regions, Executive Vice President of Sales for Club Wyndham and WorldMark by Wyndham, then Chief Sales and Marketing Officer. The title arrived around 2009. By then, he had already spent the better part of two decades learning what makes a vacation sale travel from a conversation to a customer relationship.
Joins the business and earns Rookie of the Year.
Receives an ARDA Gold Award.
Appointed Chief Sales and Marketing Officer.
Continues on the Travel + Leisure Co. executive committee.
The long apprenticeshipStaying is only interesting when the job keeps changing
There is a temptation to read a 35-year tenure as a monument to loyalty. It is more useful to read it as a record of accumulating context. A site leader sees the gap between a corporate idea and a customer conversation. A regional leader notices which problems repeat and which belong to a particular market. An enterprise executive learns that every clean metric contains a dozen messy human choices. Myers's career has moved through all three perspectives without abandoning the first.
That matters in vacation ownership, where the customer proposition has unusual depth. It is not a single hotel night and not merely a booking interface. It is an ongoing relationship involving destinations, availability, financing, service, exchange and the future version of a family's free time. The Travel + Leisure Co. portfolio includes Club Wyndham, WorldMark, Margaritaville Vacation Club, Sports Illustrated Resorts and Accor Vacation Club. Together, the vacation ownership brands comprise more than 270 resorts and serve over 800,000 owners. The product may be measured in interests and points; the customer experiences it in birthdays, school breaks and the rare week when everyone can travel.
“Connecting purpose with passion is key to achieving success in any field.”Jeff Myers, public profile
Purpose and passion can sound airy until they encounter a quota. Myers's public career joins them to a formidable scoreboard. Under his direction in 2023, more than 4,400 sales and marketing associates generated over $2.1 billion in annual gross vacation ownership interest sales. They worked across 90 sales locations and produced more than 590,000 tours through 240 local marketing locations. The scale is not decoration. It explains the operating challenge: inspiration must become a process, and the process must survive hundreds of thousands of encounters without feeling processed.
Culture by repetitionA jacket can be an operating tool
Myers speaks the language of recognition fluently because he has lived on both sides of it. His 1991 Rookie of the Year honor was followed by an American Resort Development Association Gold Award in 1996. He later participated in an ARDA Gold Award-winning task force that helped develop the industry's Leadership-Education-Action-Service program. His public profile also lists him as a 30-time President's Club inductee. Even in an industry fond of leaderboards, thirty is an arresting number: a career rendered as a shelf of repeated seasons.
One of his public posts explains what happens after five President's Club appearances. The honoree earns a special “LEGEND” jacket. Myers names six colleagues who qualified, then adds the practical flourish: call him and he will check their sizes. It is a small story with a useful managerial idea tucked inside. Recognition works best when it is specific, visible and close enough to touch. The jacket turns an abstract standard into an object; naming the people turns a performance system back into a community.
The same instinct appears in the annual Club Elite celebration, where Myers and fellow marketing executive Tom Shelburne have honored top vacation ownership marketing professionals and leaders. In 2023, the gathering took winners to Punta Cana for excursions, local music and a disco-themed farewell. Corporate recognition is often accused of wearing a lanyard and overstaying lunch. Here it gets a passport. The setting reinforces the product: people who help others imagine holidays are rewarded with one worth remembering.
His public writing is similarly direct. He returns to optimism, gratitude and inclusion. “You're either winning or learning,” he wrote in a Thanksgiving reflection, before urging an “attitude of gratitude.” Elsewhere: “attitude is a choice.” These are compact sales-floor phrases, designed to survive a difficult afternoon. They also reveal his preferred unit of culture. Not the manifesto, but the repeatable line. Not an abstract value, but a phrase a person can use when the day goes sideways.
Make the purpose legible. People work better when the number connects to a human outcome.
Turn recognition into ritual. A standard becomes culture when people can see who lived it.
Keep the phrase portable. “Winning or learning” fits inside the moment it is needed.
The widening promiseFrom a resort stay to a portfolio of moments
The vacation ownership proposition has widened during Myers's tenure. The company behind Fairfield became Wyndham Vacation Ownership, then Wyndham Destinations, then Travel + Leisure Co. after the 2021 acquisition of the Travel + Leisure brand. The names track a broader ambition: from owning places to organizing leisure. Myers's own role follows that curve. Sales remains central, but partnerships and experiences increasingly give members new reasons to use the relationship.
A 2025 partnership with Hornblower Group makes the shift concrete. Travel + Leisure Co. gained a presence across ports and vessels, while owners and guests gained access to City Cruises Live events, performances, culinary programs and guided experiences. Myers described the aim as creating “unforgettable moments” and pointed to access for food lovers, music fans and people looking for an adventure. A vacation club, in this framing, is not a fixed week inside four walls. It is a permission slip that should keep discovering new nouns.
The strategic lesson is hiding in the customer journey. Marketing creates the possibility. Sales clarifies the commitment. Finance makes the decision workable. Operations fulfills it. A partnership refreshes the reasons to return. No department owns the whole memory, which is precisely why Myers works across so many of them. Customers experience a continuous promise even when the org chart is full of boxes.
“This partnership is all about creating unforgettable moments for our owners.”Jeff Myers, on the Hornblower collaboration
The human scorecardInclusion belongs inside the operating system
Myers also serves as executive sponsor of the company's diversity resource group for LGBTQIA+ associates and allies. The assignment sits naturally beside his focus on performance culture. A workforce spread across countries, resorts and sales locations cannot rely on sameness for cohesion. It needs a shared standard broad enough for different people to see themselves inside it. Inclusion becomes practical when it shapes who receives support, whose work is visible and who believes a long career is available to them.
Outside the company, his public profile notes support for Give Kids The World Village, the Central Florida organization that helps provide memorable vacations for children with serious illnesses and their families. The connection is poignant without requiring ornament: a travel executive supporting a place built around the emotional value of time away together. It brings the language of “memories” out of the campaign and back to its human stakes.
Myers attended Coastal Carolina University in Myrtle Beach, graduated from the CEO Academy at the Wharton School of Business and holds a certificate from the Global Institute of Leadership Development. Formal education sits beside the longer curriculum of his career: learning the resort floor, the regional portfolio and the executive table in sequence. He did not parachute into hospitality with a theory of how it should work. He stayed close enough, long enough, to watch the theory meet travelers.
What the career teachesThe customer never sees the org chart
The most stealable part of Myers's story is not longevity by itself. Staying can become inertia. His version has involved a widening field of responsibility: from selling, to leading sites, to managing regions, to coordinating a system in which brand, training, finance and operations share one customer promise. Each step preserves useful knowledge from the last. The frontline becomes a reference point rather than a chapter to forget.
There is an elegant tension at the center of the work. Travel is purchased because people want an interruption to routine; providing it reliably requires extraordinary routine. The guest wants surprise. The operator needs standards. The marketer sells possibility. The company must deliver a room, a date and a welcome with boring precision. Myers's career lives in that contradiction, treating process as the backstage crew for delight.
After 35 years, the scale around him is much larger than the one he entered. Yet his public vocabulary remains strikingly compact: purpose, passion, gratitude, choice, learning. Perhaps that is the point. A complex organization needs systems, but people need sentences. The work of leadership is to make the two agree often enough that a family opens a hotel-room door, looks around and feels that the imagined vacation has finally arrived.