Travel involves taking people to different places. But not merely that. If getting people from one place to another was the crux of it, we would be talking about transportation, not travel. Travel is about going to different places for the express purpose of experiencing things. This is the essence of what we as travel-providers are focused on. Yes, we want our products to cost less. We want them to be devoid of delays or interruptions. But above all, we want them to be exhilarating, memorable and life-changing. As our mission statement here at Corporate Travel captures well, the collective purpose for which we are engaged is to enhance lives, promote culture, and to open the world to our clients.
So how is that done?
In second grade we are taught what nouns are. Nouns are words that represent people, places and things. And in our sector of the travel industry where we focus on experiential travel, all three of those feature prominently in our products. The people we introduce our clients to, the hidden places that fill all their senses, and the profound, tangible things our guests are able to contemplate first-hand are the building blocks of any experiential travel encounter. We connect our guests with the exotic, historic, and sacred places of the world in ways that could never be done without our help. But what makes these places and things worth experiencing? Why do people invest so much of their financial and emotional resources to visit and interact physically with other objects and foreign locations across our planet? The answer is because someone, somewhere, at some previous point in time suffered some strife, exerted some inspired influence, or achieved some profound accomplishment to give those locations and those things extraordinary value.
The clients we serve take millions of photos every year to prove they have encountered certain places and things. They plaster their evidence across Instagram and Facebook as if to proclaim, “Look! Here is the moment I did something that changed my life!” Here I am standing next to Michelangelo’s David, strolling atop the Great Wall of China, or marveling among th