we check it out. you check in.

If you’ve been following us on social media, you know that we’ve just recently returned from our “safari on steroids.” Our trip to Tanzania was pretty much chock-a-block full of game drives, and we moved around quite a bit. There wasn’t much downtime. And with good reason!

When we travel, we don’t build in a lot of time to relax and kick back, because our top priority is to see what our clients will experience when we send them on vacation. So, on our recent trip to Africa, we booked through a supplier in our network of preferred tour operators and stayed in accommodations that participate in our agency’s hotel program.

And it was great — we stayed in a coffee lodge and did a “bean-to-cup” tour of the coffee fields, which we’d 100% recommend to our clients. We stayed in a treetop lodge — our room was literally a treehouse with an expansive balcony, built around a giant baobab tree. We experienced the Virtuoso® VIP amenities for ourselves when we stayed in a gorgeous colonial manor. And we can now tell our clients about the luxury tented camp in the Serengeti, where hippos grazed below our balcony at night!

But it goes even further than that. Because of the ongoing pandemic, we had to have a well-timed COVID test in order to return to the US (even though we’re fully-vaccinated). Of course, we stay up-to-speed on all of the latest developments, but by traveling during the pandemic with a supplier we trust, we also got to see (and evaluate) how well they facilitated getting our test results in a timely manner. (And, they did a great job, by the way).

Part of being able to do a good job for our clients is knowing what differentiates one supplier from another, and having relationships with those suppliers, so that we can trust them to take good care of our travelers. We’ve been to every continent, and more than 60 countries, ourselves, and we’ve traveled with tour operators and cruise lines all around the globe. We’ve stayed in hotels and resorts of every shape and stripe. So when you’re ready to travel, drop us a line!