At the USTOA Annual Conference and Marketplace in Austin in late November, I had the good fortune of running into Scott Nisbet, the CEO of the Globus Family of Brands.

As head of one of the most global of all tour operators, Scott Nisbet is a good person to talk to for reading what is happening in the global travel industry. The Globus Family of brands includes Globus escorted tours, Cosmos budget priced tours, Monograms independent tour packages, and Avalon Waterways river cruises. It’s about as broad a selection of travel products as is offered by any company anywhere. Based in Lugano, Switzerland, the company’s reach spreads around the world and touches every aspect of the travel business that is part of a tour, and that’s practically everything. The company offers programs on six continents and sixty-five countries.

Travel advisors know that the key to a successful trip is putting the right customer in the right place, and then matching their expectations to reality. And there’s no place that’s truer than in Alaska.

Over the years, I’ve been lucky enough to cruise Alaska three times. But I never saw the vast and wild interior of the forty-ninth state until last week, when my husband and I and a couple of friends set off on our first-ever Globus bus tour to explore the 49th state from the ground. With 37 other curious explorers and one terrific tour director named Kip Wheeler, we drove almost 100 hours on the highways and byways, rode the train to Denali National Park, took a paddle boat to a native village, played with a litter of seven-week-old Iditarod dogs, and watched the sea lions line up for lunch on opening day of pink salmon season.

For hours, as the bus rolled on through the sun and the rain and the detours around washed-out roads, we were immersed in the vast emptiness of Alaska’s forests, mountains, and glaciers. On Day Three alone, we drove 370 miles. We often ate what the locals ate: fried cod and chips, buffalo meatloaf, the inevitable choice of turkey or ham sandwiches.

Avalon Waterways is dedicated to preserving the precious environments surrounding the world’s riverbanks with the Lighthouse Project, an initiative created to help travelers come together to reduce their footprint and give generously for the globe’s greater good.

With a mission of nurturing a culture of care and sustainability that extends to guests, the Lighthouse Project is focused on three, give-back categories:

Planet: Conserve and preserve each destination visited. To protect waterways and wildlife and shine a light on organizations that do the same. Read the rest of this entry »

It doesn’t feel right to talk about business as usual when we are confronted daily with the destruction of lives and monuments of civilization in Ukraine. It seems unseemly to gush about good news while such a horror is ongoing among people who look like they may have been just like you and me a month ago.

Nevertheless, there is some good news, and it’s important to recognize it, and to feel gratitude, remembering that “there but for the grace of God go I.” Read the rest of this entry »

If ever there was a perfect time for a guided vacation, this is it.

As bored, but wary, travelers consider heading out their front doors, many still are concerned about how to navigate the ever-changing regulations, capacity restrictions, and chance of coming down with Covid far from home. If you can’t take your favorite travel advisor along with you, a guided vacation seems like the next-best thing.

Companies like Adventures by Disney, Collette, Globus, Insight Vacations/Luxury Gold, Tauck and Trafalgar, and the travel advisors who sell them, are reporting growing interest and sold-out tour groups to top US destinations—even in April and May of 2021. Collette’s website shows its Painted Canyons of the West, which includes five national parks, is sold out for all three May departures; National Parks is sold out for May Read the rest of this entry »