Price, Stein and Abernathey weren’t expecting to be among the 25 employees at Delta Vacations now celebrating 25 years with the company, which also is celebrating its 25th anniversary in Minot this year.

Delta Vacations kicked off what will be a year-long anniversary observance Thursday at its headquarters on North Broadway with a Minot Area Chamber EDC ribbon cutting ceremony.

Delta Vacations employs 430 people – 600 across the entire organization – and although those employees signed on for different reasons, the reasons 25-year employees say they stayed sound similar.

“It’s the culture, the travel and the people,” said Price, who now works full time and oversees a sales team as customer engagement leader.

Michelle Cowper, vice president of Customer Service & Operations Strategy at Delta Vacations in Minot, holds the scissors as she is joined by those employees celebrating 25 years with the company and by Minot Area Chamber EDC Ambassadors in cutting a ribbon to mark the company’s 25th anniversary in Minot Thursday.

“I’ve made such strong, lifelong friends with this job,” said Stein, a lead who assists other agents with technical and other questions.

“We kind of all just grew up at this job together,” said Abernathey, a training specialist.

They played softball together. They raised their children, celebrated milestone birthdays and made people’s vacation dreams come true together.

“Once you work in the travel industry, it draws you in and keeps you, and it’s an ever-changing industry,” Abernathey said. “We are all so very supportive of each other, and the life experiences that we all have gotten from being part of this company is, I think, beyond our imagination.”

The opportunity to travel and then share that information with customers is part of the job’s enticement, said Mary Curtis, who works for Delta Vacations in revenue management in Minneapolis. Curtis started with the company, then MLT, in 1998 as part of the transition team to bring on and train employees in Minot.

Delta Vacations utilizes destination training, in which employees travel to popular vacation spots to experience the sights, activities and hotel options so they can speak firsthand and with a greater understanding to customers planning their vacations.

“I got to go to New Zealand last year,” Price said. “I would have never been able to see what I’ve been able to see without this job. I was able to come back and let my team know all about it.”

Jennifer Hamel, a reservation manager, said Delta Vacations offered eight trips last year.

“On any given year, between 80 and 100 people probably take a destination trip,” said Hamel, who reached 25 years with Delta Vacations last October. When people ask why she stays, she mentions the character of travel industry people.

“The people that I work with are people that really want to help other people,” she said. “It’s really a special group of people.”

Hamel had moved back to Minot from Minnesota to take a job at what then was a new company in her hometown.

“I worked for Northwest Airlines in Minnesota and they pitched this job as ‘Northwest is moving to Minot.’ I was like – ‘Perfect! I’m going home,'” Hamel said.

The predecessor for Delta Vacations selected Minot at a time when the community was recruiting call centers.

“It was an economic development push to bring good, longstanding, important jobs to our community,” Mark Lyman, economic developer with MACEDC, said at the ribbon cutting. “It was the MAGIC Fund and a number of other incentives from the state that helped attract MLT at that time to come here.”

However, he said that was just the start of economic development as the company has grown significantly and impacted the community through various employee volunteer efforts and its support for the Home for the Holidays program that offers flights to military personnel at Minot Air Force Base.

“Over the years, many things have changed,” said Michelle Cowper, vice president of Customer Service and Operations Strategy at Delta Vacations’ Minot Customer Engagement Center. “We went through name changes. We went through all the ebbs and flows in the travel industry, and we keep coming back and coming back strong. But one of the things that hasn’t changed is our commitment to our customers, our commitment to our team members and our employees, and our pride and commitment to the Minot community.”

Delta Vacations, in business for more than 50 years, is a subsidiary of Delta Airlines, which acquired MLT Vacations in a merger with Northwest Airlines in 2008. Delta Vacations is one of the largest providers of vacation packages in America, with flights to more than 300 destinations in 60 countries.