Every flight’s a honeymoon for these attendants

VIA INSTAGRAM

American Airlines flight attendants Desiree and Marquise Burns of Charlotte share a meal with a giraffe visitor in Nairobi, Kenya. The couple have been airline attendants for 10 years and married for five, which takes them around the world.

Desiree and Marquise Burns have the best of both worlds — traveling the globe in love.

The Charlotte couple have been American Airlines flight attendants for 10 years and married almost five years. They met in 2013 in Miami at a bar called Wet Willie’s during a flight attendant mixer. An hour before the event, Marquise added Desiree to be his friend through a Facebook group called African American Airlines created for people of color working in the field.

“I was moving tables around. Just so happened when I was up, she was walking in the door and I opened the door for her,” said Marquise, 35. “The first thing I said to her was ‘you look so familiar.’ She was like, ‘you just friended me about an hour ago.”

“We just like vibed the whole night,” added Desiree, 39.

They were friends for seven months before they dated and later were engaged.  

“I proposed in Egypt on the Nile River,” said Marquise.

They married on Sept. 27, 2018, in Greece and spent their honeymoon in Venice, Italy. Their job has taken them to Nairobi, Kenya, Thailand, Bali, Rome, and Belize.
“Our goal is to go everywhere, like everywhere was on our list,” Desiree said.

A couple of months ago, the couple started working together on the same trips so that they could spend more time together. Desiree decided to become a flight attendant after her aunt, who has worked for United Airlines for 40 years, encouraged her to give it a try. Prior to that, she worked as an administrator for a surgery center in her hometown Denver, Colorado. But she always loved to travel. Ten years later, she finally took her aunt’s advice.

On the other hand, Marquise didn’t know anything about being a flight attendant.

He was fresh out of college after graduating Western Kentucky University with a degree in graphic design. Marquise, who attended college on a football scholarship, could have pursued an opportunity to play professionally, but he wasn’t interested.  

After graduation, he couldn’t find a job in his field of study. A pilot he knew told him to consider becoming a flight attendant to network.  “We feel like we live several lifetimes because one of the things we've done, there's a family out there saving up the whole life to [travel],” Marquise said.

Outside of traveling, Desiree said the best part of being a flight attendant is the freedom and flexibility. As a stewardess, one of the qualities you must possess is empathy for passengers.

“Pretty much like sympathy and empathy for other people,” she said.  “You have to be a people person. I always tell people like somebody could get on the plane and they're not really in a good mood, but you don’t know. They could be flying to bury a child.”

The hardest part of the job is working on holidays and missing special moments with family and friends.

“In the beginning, the loneliness because you’re still trying to adjust. It’s a lifestyle,” Desiree said. “You’re still trying to adjust to the lifestyle and like missing out on like baby showers and Christmases and this and that.”

Desiree added they try to travel three days on and have three days off. By having seniority on the job, they can adjust their work schedules to travel together and have days off.

One thing about the couple is they don’t take their work home. Instead, they direct most of their attention to their side hustles.  “We enjoy work, we go home, we don’t talk about work,” Marquise said. “We started capitalizing on our own businesses.” Marquise has his own celebrity hat maker business called Burns Brims, which markets wide brim fedoras.

Desiree has an online store called Oliva and Ivy Boutique on the website Etsy where she sells baby onesies. She also wrote the children’s book “Ivy Discovers Her Mermaid,” which is sold on Amazon.

The Burnses also has a YouTube channel and Instagram page called Desi & Quise Wanderlove where they blog about the countries they travel to. They don’t have children but at the end of this year they are thinking about starting a family.

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