Travel & Tourism Awards 2021

Page 20 www.lux-review.com LUX 2021 Travel & Tourism Awards CARE Travel is a concierge and boutique travel experience designing service based in Manhattan, Kansas that seeks to create personalized and exemplary experiences for clients. CARE stands for Concierge and Romantic Escapes, and the CARE team seeks to instil heart and passion into every element of their services. In this way, they wish to ensure that first and foremost they offer experiences to clients, from which they will create long-lasting and treasured travel memories. They take concierge duties to the next level by making travel experiences a truly unique experience, focusing on the romantic aspects of travel. They also ensure that each client feels truly catered to, no matter what the specifics of the experience they seek are. To do this, CARE’s ‘dream team’ of travel designers oversee every element of the planning. Each team member is highly skilled and certified. They thoughtfully craft and book each item on the itinerary, and each takes great pride in creating a long-standing and positive relationship with the clients over the course of their work with CARE Travel. By approaching each experience as a team, the designers can offer their expertise and perspectives in the planning to make the resulting vacation as smooth and memorable as possible. Each member of CARE’s designers takes great personal pride in the vacations they have a hand in creating. They offer packages such as destination weddings, proposals, and honeymoons, romantic trips, mystery escapes, spa and wellness getaways, world adventures, overwater luxury escapes, bachelor and bachelorette parties, and family vacations. They also offer cultural immersion escapes that allow clients to fully integrate themselves into another culture. A true learning experience wherein a portion of proceeds are given to a CARE Travel partner charity of the client’s choice. Finally, CARE Travel offers retreats and group travel experiences for friends and professional groups. Although the leisure and tourism industry has been hit hard across the board during the pandemic, small luxury boutique vacation agency CARE Travel has been using this time to grow and come back better than ever. Dec20430 CARE Travel Small-Group & Destination Wedding Travel Specialists of the Year - Midwest USA They encourage each client to take time to see what they offer and then contact them to discuss how they might tailor a package to best fit them. CARE Travel champions the idea that a truly memorable vacation is more than just a few clicks on a travel agency’s website. Their designers take care to truly get to know the person they’re working with. Due to this, most of their clients get in touch with them after hearing the excellent word-of- mouth reviews that past clients give. Due to the nature of the travel and leisure industry, Covid-19 has of course been serious challenge for CARE Travel to overcome in the past year. Due to border closures and travel restrictions, going overseas was no longer an option. Lockdown stymied national travel as people found themselves sequestered in their homes. Furthermore, even during the periods of the lockdown being lifted, many establishments that cater to tourists and travel groups had to close their doors due to social distancing rules and the need to implement stricter health and safety regulations. The CARE Travel team has found that they can count themselves among the lucky, because many of their client’s travels were able to be moved with relatively little fuss, and very few had to be cancelled completely. Due to this, they found that they could survive the pandemic and take advantage of the slower time to enhance and build on their client and supplier relationships. Furthermore, people dealing with quarantine fatigue have been coming to CARE Travel to plan for future vacations and getaways. They believe that once the pandemic is over they will be seeing a boom in demand for their services. Moving forward into 2021, they have a multitude of plans for their business – of all of these, they are most looking forward to their ‘give back’ program. They will also be re- examining their design processes to offer an even more personalised and tailored service. They’ll be revisiting in-depth, the foundations that their business was built upon. Company: CARE Travel Contact: Niki Rakowitz Website: www.CARETravel.com