Today we’d like to introduce you to Laura Madrid. She shares her story with us below:
Laura Madrid has always had an intense passion for travel, people, food, and experiences. Laura’s fascination with travel was sparked at a young at age when her adventurous mother piloted her kids and dog in a five-seater single engine airplane through the towering mountains of Central America to start a new life for her family in Costa Rica.
Since then, Laura has also lived, studied, and worked in Italy, Mexico, and the United Kingdom. She has traveled to over 80 countries, returning to many of them dozens of times, and has had the wonderful fortune to escort her own children to 40+ countries around the globe.
Laura’s professional background includes nearly 20 years in key operations and sales & marketing roles with top luxury hotel companies: Four Seasons, St. Regis, and Ritz-Carlton. Having launched her own travel consulting business in January 2011 and affiliating with Travel Experts, A Virtuoso agency, Laura has grown an uber successful travel consulting business that specializes in upmarket leisure travel with a focus on adventure, wellness, gastronomy & wine. A self-professed hotel junkie, Laura takes it upon herself to personally inspect the world’s special and unique gems in order to guide her clients to just the place and room that will make their journey a stand out. Laura’s discerning clients are affluent families with children, empty-nester & couples who live primarily in the United States, Canada and Australia – and who rank travel as one of their top leisure priorities and investments and rely on Resort to Laura Madrid to manage it flawlessly.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
Running a travel advisory during a global pandemic has got to be one of the most challenging periods I have ever imagined. No one could have prepared me for what I would face emotionally and physically as the pandemic unfolded around the world and I had to stay ahead of each twist and turn in order to advise and help my clients navigate. As a travel advisor, I spend 80% of my time planning travel for my client’s future trips. All of the work goes in months and often years before a client will actually travel so in March 2020 when I watched all of my Spring Break bookings unravel and I had to help clients cancel or move their programs to future years, it was a shocking and exhausting experience for me and my team. Once we finally got all of the Spring Break business off the books and the pandemic continued to rage with country and border closures, we then started tackling cancellations and relocations of our other peak period which was our summer travel business. This was an emotional and stressful time for our clients and my priority was to help them feel comfortable that their travel investment was safe and that we would help them cancel or move every single detail of their trip to the following year. We all know how this story goes, 2021 turned into 2022 as the virus continued to challenge every aspect of the life as we knew it. The ability to travel freely had been removed and this was very humbling to many of us. I made a decision to keep my entire staff on throughout the pandemic and provide exceptional service to my clients even though we were not making money. I knew that keeping my seasoned team on board for the two years during the pandemic and insuring our customers knew that we would always be there for them was the smartest thing I could do and it has paid off tremendously in that my team and my customers know they can count on me no matter what.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
I am a professional travel advisor with a high degree of credibility. My clients trust my opinions and recommendations. They know that I understand their lifestyle and high expectations and if I suggest a resort or send them across the world on an adventure, they are going to be very well taken care of. Life happens and things don’t always go to plan in the wonderful world of travel, but how I can help my clients turn around an unexpected delay or emergency is what clients really remember. I am a bit of workaholic but I genuinely love what I do and wake up every day completely excited to work on setting up incredible travel experiences for my clients. No two days look alike and there is always a challenging request or a need to juggle multiple balls at all times. I am really proud of my team who are like that swan in the water, kicking like crazy under the water so that all the clients see is the elegant and graceful glide of the swan above water. I personally hire each of my team members and teach them everything I know. What sets me apart from other travel advisors is my personal travel savvy – I take the same trips my clients take and really know what I am selling, my work ethic and ability to make quick decisions and cut through the red tape in order to expeditiously run my business, and my relationships in the industry – I worked for 20 years with the best hotel companies in the world and have friends literally in every corner of the world. My name means something in the industry and that translates into extra amenities, service and care for my clients when they travel.
Before we go, is there anything else you can share with us?
Being a travel advisor looks really glamorous to some, but it really is an incredible amount of work and stress. Though I travel at least once a month, I have not had a “vacation” in 11 years. Every day is work and even when I am somewhere wonderful, I am meeting hoteliers and guides, experiencing in one day what most travelers do in an entire week, taking notes, writing my blog and all of this while managing my team and office and handling client requests. I never ever turn on an “Out of Office” assistant on my emails. Our clients know they can count on me and my team no matter where in the world I am. When I interview team members and they say that they want to work with me because they love to travel, I tell them that is not the job. The job is having a passion for making other people happy. That is what we do, we make our client’s lives even more wonderful every single day, one trip at a time!
Pricing:
- My clients pay an annual fee to be a part of the Resort to Laura Madrid Club
- The itineraries I put together for my clients generally start at $1000 per person per day including lodging, activities, guides, activities
Contact Info:
- Email: laura@resorttolauramadrid.com
- Website: www.resorttolauramadrid.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/resorttolauramadrid/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ResorttoLauraMadridTravel/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/ResortToLaura
- Other: https://lauramadridtravel.com/
