From Secrets to Compassionate Journeys
How uncovering family mysteries inspired a life-changing travel business
Kerri Johnson is telling this story the night before she flies to San Francisco on a business trip, raising a simple question: Does life imitate art, or does art imitate life?
The answer doesn’t matter as much as the story, which seems to have lifted itself from the annals of a tortured family mystery or a Cinderella fairy tale into real-life light of day.
But unlike in the fairy tale, her happy ending, if there is such a thing, has depended entirely on Johnson’s heart, business acumen and gritty instinct for perseverance. Not on a prince who rescues her.
A registered nurse of 34 years now living on the Southwest Florida coast, six years ago she conceived of a plan to wrest control of her working life selling surgical spine implants by starting the business she calls GOMO Travel, short for GO MORE. She put the business in literal motion starting in 2019.
At first, and right through COVID in the spring of 2020, when air travel was undertaken only out of necessity by most, the idea and the execution were simple in concept, although sometimes difficult in practice: She would escort people unable to travel on their own to their destinations.