Each year, thousands of Americans set off on specialty
vacations
– trips designed to take them away from everything and everyone
they’ve ever known for an experience like none they could find at a
regular resort.
Each year, thousands of Americans set off on specialty vacations – trips designed to take them away from everything and everyone they’ve ever known for an experience like none they could find at a regular resort.
Unlike vacationers three or four decades ago, today’s travelers are in search of something more out-of-the-ordinary, and a new line of companies are lining up to meet their demands with a new category of travel: adventure.
“The world, in some ways, keeps getting smaller,” said Joyce Patereau, owner of Gilroy Travel. “It’s very likely that people in their first couple of significant vacations will be seeing Hawaii or Mexico – they’re close-by and affordable – but as people grow, their lifestyles change and their kids get older, the rest of the world gets a bit more interesting to them because now they can go.”
Patereau’s clients have followed the routes of early explorers and sailed around Cape Horn in South America, have seen the terra cotta soldiers in Xian, China, and ventured into the depths of the Amazon jungle. They’ve gone on safari in Africa and braved the wilds of Denali National Park in Alaska.
But, wait. Exciting as it all is, hasn’t it all been done before?
“Yes, people were doing this a long time ago, but we tend to name and categorize everything now, and adventure travel goes in with leisure travel or family travel,” said Patereau. “It’s kind of a misnomer, but it just means you have spirit.”
For clients of Karen Chavez, a travel agent at Christopher Travel Network in Morgan Hill, that spirit means pumping up the physical activity quotient by taking on hiking, bicycling, minimarathons, scuba diving or white-water rafting. She can even book heli-skiing or heli-hiking trips, allowing customers to be dropped off in pristine mountain wilderness with nothing but a downward slope ahead, but adventure doesn’t have to be equated with crazy sports and death-defying feats. It can simply be living a dream.
More than four years ago, as she saw New York’s twin towers fall to the ground, Queens resident Cindy Heinze had a revelation.
“I realized this is the only life you get, and if you want to go do something, it has to be done now because tomorrow may never arrive,” said the 58-year-old graphic designer. “I wanted to go see the Galapagos Islands because I’d read and heard so much about them.”
That dream, along with a brochure and a special on the Discovery channel, were enough to convince Heinze and her friend Susan Scharf, 48, to book what they call “a trip of a lifetime” – a 13-day package tour through Lindblad Expeditions.
In the Galapagos, Heinze and Scharf watched blue-footed boobies, found only in the island chain, perform their mating dance. A sea lion that took an interest in Heinze waddled up and nuzzled her knee, and Scharf watched the tour group’s staff gently lift a 90-year-old woman over the edge of the inflatable Zodiac boat on a remote beach.
Months later, Heinze still can’t quite describe the experience.
“It was a magical place,” Heinze said. “It’s a place I never imagined I’d see. The scenery is everything from lush greenery to barrenness. The ocean is an incredible blue.”
Certainly the pair had an adventure, but just what constitutes an adventure is a matter of debate, according to travel agents and tour operators in the field. What is exciting to one client may be intimidating or just downright lame to another, so for ease of use, here’s their definition: adventure travel takes you outside of your comfort zone. That can mean going somewhere far away, enjoying some form of extreme sport or focusing on a just absorbing the sights, sounds and culture of a region.
“I would say that, at one time, people were very happy just going to a resort and hanging out, but there has been a huge shift in the last 15 years or so, where people want some more experience,” said Gary Murtagh, president of ElderTreks.com, the worlds first adventure travel company specifically for people over age 50. “They want to meet people from a different culture or see wildlife in its own environment. They want to see archaeological sites or the rainforest, and it seems to move them in some way. They come back a little more educated, a little more insightful into the earth we live on. The emphasis is more on experience than on hotels and meals and entertainment.”
Most of Murtagh’s clients, like other operators’, are well-traveled and educated. His are also overwhelmingly local – about 1/3 of the Toronto-based businessman’s clientele come from California.
But while nearly any travel agent can now book a vacation that would have seemed impossible 40 years ago, some still seek out Sven Lindblad, whose company, Lindblad Expeditions, started the adventure craze.
Lindblad’s father, Lars-Eric, pioneered the concept of adventure travel as we know it today through his company Lindblad Travel. Beginning in the 1950s and 1960s, he introduced vacationers to such exotic locales as Antarctica, Bhutan, China and Easter Island, often working in areas where accommodations were few, if available at all. By 1979, he’d established enough routes to spin off a separate expedition company, Lindblad Expeditions, and a genre was born. Now under management by his son, Lindblad Expeditions is currently ranked one of the best travel services in the world by Conde Nast.
Still, the field is wide open,m according to competitors. Murtagh, for one, sees untapped growth potential in travel that pushes the bounds of a person’s comfort zone.
“People’ve been doing it since Cooke and Drake and the first explorers,” said Murtagh. “That was hard-core adventure, and they still want adventure. People’s reason for traveling has sort of shifted, though, from acquiring gold for the king and queen, to enriching their own souls.”
For more information on adventure travel, call Christopher Travel Network in Morgan Hill at (408) 776-7818 or Gilroy Travel at (408) 842-5671. To deal directly with tour operators, visit ElderTreks.com online or call them at (800) 741-7956. For more information on Lindblad Expeditions, visit www.Expeditions.com or call (800) EXPEDITION.
