March 1, 2010It had been two decades since Giuliano Lorenzani and his wife, Judy, bought Boca Raton Travel & Cruises, and it was time, he said, to take the agency "from yesterday to tomorrow."
January 19, 2010When Anne Sherwood "jumped on the incredible opportunity" to launch a travel agency at Camp Pendleton, Calif., she had her detractors. They said she would fail.
November 30, 2009Rod Smith has long and deep connections to the travel business -- and to a subset of travelers, the deaf. Three years ago, he merged those two passions to create Harvesttime Deaf Travel in Fridley, Minn., outside of Minneapolis.
October 26, 2009When Vic Sarkisyan founded his Glendale, Calif., travel agency in 1994, he figured he had to do something other agencies were not doing. He settled on cable TV as his communications medium.
October 12, 2009Sales at Lincoln Travel in Bridgewater, Va., were up 69% for the first half of the year. That would be impressive in a good year, never mind a year of deep recession. The secret? Owner Steve Lincoln latched onto a new market niche: study-abroad programs. His new clients, tired of being do-it-yourselfers, helped expand that aspect of the agency's business relatively quickly.
September 14, 2009Before she owned her own travel agency, Donna Zeigfinger had been the subject of articles in the Washington Post and the Vegetarian Times, thanks to her work with vegetarian and vegan travelers. Zeigfinger said she was astonished at the response she received -- up to 30 calls a day initially -- and at how long readers kept the clips. She said she received first-time calls from readers as much as five years after publication.
August 24, 2009Dorrie Green got lucky. She has been selling incentive travel for at least 15 years, and in today's climate, that's not the lucky part of this story. However, by the time the financial system teetered and high-end corporate travel took on a patina of shame, Green was already developing plans to supplement her incentive travel offerings with merchandise-based rewards.
July 20, 2009Pamela Wieder-Bier operates a successful one-woman ARC agency in upstate New York by following her heart.
June 22, 2009Santa Cruz Travel is a survivor: a traditional, full-service, brick-and-mortar agency whose roots in its namesake California beach town run deep. The agency is celebrating its 45th anniversary this year, a significant milestone because the business weathered not only the industry's ups and downs but also a natural disaster: the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake.
May 18, 2009Fernando Gonzalez was in high school when he made his first booking for First in Service Travel in New York.
May 4, 2009Tom Reaney developed a niche specialty long before industry experts exhorted travel agents to take down their "full-service" banners and focus on one or a few destinations or types of vacation experiences. For Reaney, the specialty is Mazatlan, the Mexican port and resort city on the Pacific coast.
April 20, 2009Rainbow Travel, founded in 1982, for 24 years simply did not sell Perillo Tours packages. It was a management choice, not happenstance. However, after a change of heart three years ago, the agency is a top producer for the tour company. In 2007 and 2008, Rainbow Travel shared top honors with other agencies as a Perillo Agency of the Year, based on productivity.
April 6, 2009Frank Trotta was losing his job. He was a government appointee but had to move on because of a change in administration. It was 1989, and Trotta was a young man winding up a stint as the commissioner of aging for Suffolk County on New York's Long Island.
March 23, 2009Directional Strategies Travel, an agency with an unlikely name for a honeymoon and romance travel specialist, found its niche in the Detroit suburbs almost 20 years ago.