Heike Birlenbach ends 36-year career with Lufthansa Group

Heike Birlenbach, Swiss's commercial chief and a 36-year veteran of the Lufthansa Group, is leaving the company. She started at a Lufthansa check-in desk and went on to senior commercial roles at both Lufthansa and Swiss, according to a profile of her departure.

Birlenbach, 59, is in the air on her last working day, not in an office.

She said she never told her parents about much of her travel. On holiday she tends to avoid conventional destinations, picking countries such as Nicaragua, Guatemala, Mali, Rwanda and Uzbekistan instead. "I want to really feel the country," she said of how she chooses her routes. Those trips have sometimes brought unexpected, difficult and at times dangerous moments.

Her appetite for distant places did not come from her family, she said. Holidays at home were mostly walking trips, and she saw the sea for the first time at 16, on a cycling tour with a friend from her home town on the Mosel to Bordeaux.

As a teenager she wrote small travel guides of her own, based on what she read, including a round trip through Egypt she had never visited.

After finishing school she went to Canada for a year as an au pair, applying without telling her parents because she expected they would not approve. She later worked as a tour guide. That pull toward travel led her into an industry built on it.