Travel CV and cover letter example for school leavers

The blank page is the worst bit. You open a document, type your name, then sit there wondering what possibly goes underneath it when you've never had a job in your life.

Good news: a travel and tourism CV for a school leaver has a known shape. Every block of it can be filled from the life you've already lived, it fits on one page and a seasonal manager will read the whole thing in under a minute. Give this guide ten minutes and you'll finish with both documents drafted.

One rule before we start, the same rule that governs everything on FIRSTJOBZ: nothing here gets invented. Everything below is school, sport and volunteering-grade truth, arranged well. That's all a good first CV has ever been.

The one-page travel CV, block by block

Name and contact details. Name big at the top, then your mobile and a sensible email address. If your current one was chosen in year eight, make a new one tonight. It takes two minutes. Managers absolutely notice.

Availability, with dates. Put this directly under your name and make it specific, because seasonal hiring is a jigsaw made of dates: "Available 24 June to 3 September, full-time including weekends and bank holidays. Weekends available all year." Nothing else on the page answers the manager's first question as fast. In this industry it's the single highest-value block you'll write.

Personal statement. Two or three lines, concrete, no clichés: "Year 12 student looking for my first summer season in visitor services. Comfortable with people of all ages after two years helping run a junior football club on Saturdays. Happiest when a place is busy." That's plenty. Never write "passionate about travel with excellent communication skills" - every seasonal manager in Britain has read it and believed none of it.

Education. School name, years attended, your GCSEs or predicted grades. Lead with English and maths, then flag any language you have even at school level, because tourism is one of the few entry-level fields where that's immediately useful. Add one line for anything extra: first aid course, Duke of Edinburgh, a sports leadership award, food hygiene from a school module.

Experience that counts. Here's where "no experience" gets translated into the language of the job. Ran a stall at the school fete: "Handled cash and served the public at a school fundraiser across a full day." Scout or Guide camp: "Helped supervise younger members on a week-long residential trip." Junior coaching: "Assisted with a Saturday session of twelve under-nines, including registration and safety." Volunteering at a museum or heritage railway: "Welcomed visitors, answered questions and helped with site setup." Babysitting, a paper round held for a year, helping at a family business - each one becomes a line with a verb at the front. Two to four entries is enough.

Skills. Short list, every item provable. Cash handling from the fundraiser. Working with children from the coaching. Conversational French. First aid trained. Confident on a radio, if you've done event marshalling. If you can't back it with a story, leave it off.

Getting there. One line that most applicants forget: "I live in Ashford and can travel to site by bus, or be dropped off for early shifts." Loads of attractions and holiday parks sit outside town on poor bus routes and managers have been burned by staff who couldn't reach a 7am start. Answering that up front puts you above people who leave them guessing.

Reference. One line: "Reference available from [teacher or coach name] on request." A named adult who'll vouch for you settles the biggest question a manager has about a first-timer.

A word on format. Save it as a PDF so your layout survives someone else's screen, name the file properly - "Ellie-Marsh-CV.pdf", not "cv final FINAL 2.pdf" - and keep a couple of printed copies in a stiff envelope for walk-ins. Handing one over in person at a small attraction in March regularly beats fifty online applications in June, because now your CV has a face attached to it.

Tune the emphasis to the employer too. An attraction wants warmth and stamina, so lead with the people-facing evidence. A holiday park changeover team wants pace and reliability, so lead with the attendance streak. A travel agency wants accuracy and a bit of sales nerve, so let the maths grade and any selling experience carry the statement. Same facts, different order.

The cover letter, paragraph by paragraph

Keep it under half a page. Address it to a person if the advert names one. Four short paragraphs do the entire job.

Paragraph one: why this place. Name the site, name the role, give a real reason. "I'm applying for the seasonal visitor assistant role at Bramley Hall. We've come every summer since I was about six and I've always thought the people on the gate looked like they were enjoying themselves more than anyone else there."

Paragraph two: what you bring. Match your evidence to what the job needs, in two or three sentences. "I've helped run Saturday football sessions for under-nines for two years, so I'm used to being cheerful, patient and organised with families around. I handled the cash desk at our school fete last summer, which taught me how to stay calm with a queue in front of me."

Paragraph three: dates and appetite. "I'm free from 24 June through to 3 September, full-time, including weekends and bank holidays. I can get to the site by bus on weekdays and I'm happy to start early. I'd like a season that teaches me something rather than just a job for August."

Paragraph four: the close. One sentence, no grovelling. "I'd love the chance to show you what I'd be like on a busy day - thank you for reading."

That's the lot. A manager reads that in forty seconds and knows you bothered, which - as our sitewide guide to landing your first job puts it - is the whole signal a cover letter exists to send.

Notice what the letter never does. It never apologises for your age or your empty work history, because youth is a selling point framed correctly: energy, no bad habits, genuinely teachable. It never repeats the CV line by line, since the CV's job is facts while the letter's job is voice. And it never pads. Four paragraphs, then stop.

The five mistakes seasonal managers see constantly

No dates anywhere. The most common one by miles. "Available immediately" tells a manager staffing a season absolutely nothing. Give the window, give the weekends, give the bank holidays.

"I love travelling." Almost everybody writes it and it accidentally says you want to be on holiday rather than working somebody else's. Say what you'd do for guests instead.

The wrong site's name in the letter. The copy-paste tell. One find-and-replace slip cancels every other word, so read each application slowly once before it goes.

Invented experience. Claiming a summer at a park you never worked at collapses ninety seconds into an interview. Truth arranged well beats fiction every time - and truth doesn't wobble under a follow-up question.

Unproofed writing. Their and there, a statement that stops mid-sentence, three different fonts. Nobody needs perfect prose to work a gate, but careless errors read as carelessness generally. Get one adult to read it before you send anything.

A sixth, for the online forms bigger operators use: rushing the extra questions. When a form asks why you want to work there, that box is your cover letter in miniature and two specific sentences beat one generic one every time. Most applicants type something limp. That's exactly why writing something real works.

When the writing itself is the wall

Some people can fill in every block above and still can't make it sound like them. The facts are all there, but the sentences come out stiff. If that's you, get help with the flourish rather than the facts. That's what the FIRSTJOBZ cover letter service is for: you bring who you are and what you've genuinely done, we make it read the way you'd actually say it on a good day. Flourish, not fabrication - polishing your story instead of inventing one. Because the more you sound like a person on paper, the more a busy manager wants to meet the person.

Draft both tonight while this page is fresh, then send them somewhere real this week. Seasonal hiring rewards early far more than it rewards perfect, so an application in March lands in a much shorter pile than the same one in June. Once they're out, get ahead of the next stage with our 10 common travel interview questions, swing back through the travel and tourism hub for the rest of the series and keep half an eye on live travel jobs so the right advert never slips past you. The blank page is done. Go get the interview.