Welcome to the club!

About Courtney and The Queens and Carryons Club

I spent so many years in the travel industry helping people see the world. I knew every cruise line, every cabin category, every upsell and every workaround. I was good at my job. Really good.

But for most of those 23 years, I was also hiding.

Not from my clients. Not from my career. I was hiding from myself and from a world that had made it very clear that women who look like me were supposed to shrink before they dared to take up space. I watched plus size women hold back from travel my entire career. Watched them delay trips, skip excursions, decline photos. I saw it everywhere and I said nothing because I was doing the exact same thing. I was embarrassed to be fat and hiding felt safer than being seen.

For nearly six years I was swallowed by depression so severe I could barely get out of bed. I am talking 12 to 16 hours of sleep a day. Complete isolation. I stopped eating, stopped taking my medication, stopped showing up for the people I loved until eventually they stopped showing up for me too. I lost friendships. I missed everything. I was living inside four walls in a toxic environment that was slowly suffocating me and I knew deep down that I would never climb out of that hole while I was still in it.

Then life decided I had hidden long enough.

So I left. I packed up what I could and I moved into my own apartment with the one soul who never once gave up on me. My dog Ace.

Ace was everything. On the days I had trouble getting up, I got up for him. I fed him, walked him, cared for him and somewhere in the quiet of just the two of us I slowly started to remember who I was.

Then I was diagnosed with uterine cancer.

I will not pretend that did not break me because it did. It was the hardest thing I have ever gone through and it isnt something you can explain to someone who hasnt experienced it. But I got through it. And when I came out the other side I packed my car, threw out almost everything I owned, and Ace and I drove from New York to Florida to start over. Just us. A Hyundai Azera and whatever fit inside it.

For a while things were okay. Better than okay. I was rebuilding.

Then in May of 2025 I lost Ace.

I had promised him a backyard. I kept telling myself we had time. We would get there. And then one day we just did not. He was gone and the backyard never happened and I sat in the wreckage of that grief and realized something I cannot unknow:

I do not have time. None of us do.

Not for the backyard. Not for the trip we keep pushing to someday. Not for the life we keep telling ourselves we will start living once we lose the weight or feel ready or stop being afraid of what people think.

That realization cracked something open in me. I had always known I belonged on social media. Felt it in my bones for years. But I was terrified of being trolled, of being the fat woman the internet decided to make a joke of. So I stayed invisible.

After Ace I decided invisible was no longer an option.

I showed my face. I started talking. And thousands women showed up in what felt like a blink because apparently they had been waiting for someone to say out loud what they had been feeling for years.

There are groups for women over 40. There are groups for plus size women. But there was nothing built specifically for plus size women over 40 who want to travel and feel like the world was not designed with them in mind. Because honestly, it was not. I know that better than most. I spent more than two decades inside this industry watching it fail women like us. Watching properties bury accessibility information in fine print nobody reads. Watching staff fumble basic questions because nobody trained them to think about us. Watching women spend thousands of dollars to feel uncomfortable and unwelcome.

That ends here.

The Queens and Carryons Club is the community I wish had existed every single time a plus size woman sat across from me and quietly talked herself out of the trip she actually wanted to take. It is built for the woman who has been living in what I call The Waiting Room. Waiting to lose weight. Waiting to feel worthy. Waiting for permission from a world that was never going to give it to her.

I am not here to inspire you. I am here to be your exit door.

And because information is power, I am also building something this industry has needed for a long time. TravEndex is an accessible travel intelligence suite with ten databases covering airlines, cruise ships, ports, resorts, destinations, excursions, events, rail, health abroad and travel insurance. Real verified data on seat dimensions, cabin accessibility, resort room capacity, shore excursion terrain ratings and everything else the travel industry publishes almost nothing useful about for plus size travelers, people managing chronic illness and mobility challenged travelers. The data that should have existed a decade ago. It launches soon and when it does your next trip will not be a gamble.

You found this place for a reason. The Waiting Room is behind you now.

Welcome to the Club.