Jamie Biesiada
Five years ago, Diana Hechler, president of D. Tours Travel in Larchmont, N.Y., had an idea: Because of her agency, her personal travels and her connections in the industry, she knew of so many truly unique travel experiences. They are the kind of experiences that go way beyond, say, taking a cooking class in a destination.
What if she collected them, wrote about each and organized it into a book?
She pitched the idea to some friends at a pool party in 2018, and it was well received. But she was a busy travel agency owner, so for a while, it remained just that: an idea.
And then, the pandemic happened.
"My business stopped running," Hechler said. "There was nothing that I could do. So in about March of 2020, I said, 'If not now, when?'"
That five-year-old idea has come to fruition, and Hechler's book, "Strolling with Your Elephant: Perfect Moments in Travel" (Window Seat Press, 2023), is now available for sale.
The book, organized alphabetically by destination, features nearly 80 distinct experiences that Hechler has collected.
In the past decade, she said, there has been a lot of conversation around how travelers want authentic travel experiences. She started incorporating that more and more into her own business, offering unique opportunities to her clients. And every time she met with a supplier, she asked them a simple question: "Tell me something new that I don't know about."
Sometimes their answers would be on the blander side, like a private tour of Rome, but sometimes they would offer something like tagging rhinos in South Africa with a veterinarian (unsurprisingly, the latter made it into the book).
"The more I began asking people the right questions, the better it got," Hechler said.
Even since writing the book she's collected a handful of other, new experiences, perhaps to be featured in another edition down the road.
"There's no shortage of people who are in the travel business continuing to create new and different things to do, and that I find fascinating," she said.
The book's primary audience is consumers, but she hopes that it's also useful for people in the travel industry. It can act as something of a guidebook for fellow advisors.
"There's nothing proprietary about it at all," Hechler said.
She also feels it might be appropriate in a hotel or cruise ship library.
The experiences in the book are wide-ranging and come at different price points; some, like tracing John Wilkes Booth's path after he shot President Lincoln, are nearly free.
"I love the business that I'm in," Hechler said. "I love talking about travel. And it's wonderful to me, when I mention to someone who's going to Sydney, 'Have you ever thought about the BridgeClimb [at the Sydney Harbour Bridge]?' and they're like, 'What?' And to be able to tell them and have them come back and say, 'That was the highlight of my trip,' that's a very gratifying element.
"I hope that's what this book does, too," she added. "People look at it and go, 'I could do that? Really?'"