October 4, 2011

Welcome to our website – we hope that you will find it interesting, entertaining, helpful and easy to navigate.  We have organized the website in an attempt to clearly present the major types of leisure vacations – cruises and land vacations (i.e., tours, and resorts).  We have also highlighted the special travel opportunities for families, groups and honeymoons.  In addition, we have tried to provide travel resources that will be helpful to you in planning, preparing for and enjoying your travel.  Finally, we have included some information about our experience, training and credentials to help you get to know us.

Throughout our website, we have made recommendations and suggested options that we believe provide the best value for your travel dollar.  To this end, on the Home Page, we have presented buttons that serve as short-cuts to the endless vacation opportunities offered by our featured travel partners.  You may use this information to browse through your many options to narrow your choices and then contact us by email or phone to answer any remaining questions and book your vacation for you.  Or, for several of these travel partners (e.g., Sandals, Beaches, Globus, Dream Vacation), you may book your vacation online yourself, and then we will service your booking.

We expect our website to continually grow and evolve to reflect current, useful and relevant travel information for our readers.  In this regard, we anticipate that this will be a “dynamic” – rather than “static” – website.  While we expect that the content on all of the pages of the website will change frequently to reflect current information, this will particularly be true for the Home Page where we hope to feature the most useful information (news, events, special offers, travel tips) for our readers,  If you have topics that you would like us to consider addressing on our website or blog, please feel free to contact us and let us know.

Speaking of our blog, we plan to periodically post articles on this blog to address various aspects of travel.  For example, we plan to post reviews of destinations, resorts and cruise ships that we visit to give our readers current information and our opinion on these travel products.  We also plan to provide travel tips, based on our experience and on inside information we have access to in the travel industry, that we hope will be useful to our clients and prospective clients.  We will also be reporting on travel industry news – for example, new resorts or cruise ships, significant innovations or renovations, and changes in laws or requirements that could affect our clients.

So, again, we hope that you enjoy your visit to our website and return to it frequently.  We also hope that we can help you plan your best week of the year – your vacation!  To paraphrase the great philosopher Ray Lewis:  “Enjoy the Journey”!

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October 5, 2011

The weeks leading up to January 26, 2011, the date of the maiden voyage of Disney’s new cruise ship, the Disney Dream, were the culmination of many years of planning and anticipation for many stakeholders (e.g., Disney employees, passengers, travel agents, stockholders) in Disney Cruise Line.  Disney built its first two ships, the Disney Magic and the Disney Wonder in the late 1990’s.  While the other major cruise lines expanded their fleets over the past decade, Disney has stood pat with its two ships.  For years we had anticipated the expansion of Disney’s fleet and finally it happened.

We were fortunate to be some of the first to sail on the new ship during the Dream Inaugural festivities.  We actually went on 2 short cruises with a short visit to Walt Disney World preceding each cruise.  The first was a 2-night cruise that included the Disney Dream Christening Ceremony, after which we returned to Walt Disney World’s Contemporary Resort for the beginning of Disney’s Annual Earmarked Conference, a conference for Authorized Disney Vacation Planners.  The Conference attendees then transferred to the Disney Dream for a 3-night cruise and the remainder of the Conference.

There were several things I was anxious to see on the new Disney Dream:

• How all the space (it is over 50% larger than Disney’s other 2 ships) was used on the ship  and whether it seemed more or less crowded
• All of the new technological features
• How Disney had designed the adult spaces (e.g., adult-only pool area, lounges)
• The quality of the food and the ambiance in the new restaurants on-board, especially the upscale ones

My wife on the other hand, with more of a view toward her clients’ interests, wanted to find out:

• How the room configurations compared to the other 2 ships
• What the new children’s areas were like
• How the spa area was designed and what services were offered

In future blog entries we will be addressing these questions as we describe various aspects of the inaugural event and the features of this new cruise ship, including the Disney Dream Christening  Ceremony, the port calls at Castaway Cay (Disney’s private island) and Nassau in the Bahamas, the exterior of the ship and the interior of the ship.