Summer 2021

24 Where Dreams Come True Travel Brilliant is a full-service agency specialising in customised travel experiences. It creates personalised itineraries for its clients’ travel styles, while saving them the time and stress of planning the perfect trip, understanding how precious their vacation is to them. LUXlife magazine has recognised the company as Most Trusted Disney Travel Specialists 2021 – New York, so we take a closer look at how it goes about making dreams come true and planning trips that are remembered for a lifetime. Believing everyone deserves a vacation, Travel Brilliant does all the hard work. While individuals may plan a vacation once a year, the company plans multiple a day. It can be hard to relax on vacation when having to juggle all the logistics, so Travel Brilliant takes the planning stress off its clients’ hands so they can enjoy themselves. The company serves clients at all stages of their lives and creates customised travel plans to fit their needs. From honeymoons to family travel to retirees, each group has specific needs and desires for their vacation, and its Travel Brilliant’s job to match the right experience to the right travellers. It also works with LGBTQ+ vendors and suppliers to ensure that all their clients can experience an awe-inspiring vacation safely. The personal service the company applies to each vacation truly sets it apart. They get to know each client thoroughly and spends a lot of time asking questions during consultations, which enables them to pick out important details to helps them recommend the perfect fit. It’s this level of detail that they believe creates lasting and trusted relationships with their clients. Travel Brilliant’s work as Disney travel specialists is an area that will always be near and dear to the company. While Travel Brilliant is a global travel provider, company founder, Denise Ambrusko-Maida started her career as a Disney travel specialist and the experience of helping families plan their first Disney vacation still thrills her. A Disney vacation can sometimes seem overwhelming and the process of taking a nervous family and walking them through all their options and finding the right vacation that sparks joy is a tremendously awarding experience. The company is constantly tagged on social media in trip photos from these families; they see them pop up in their history year after year and have the privilege of watching these families grow. However, all the company’s work came to a sudden halt in March 2020 with COVID-19 hitting the travel and tourism industry especially hard, and it is only now starting to rebound. Travel will likely see a slow return throughout 2021, but the company hopes to be close to its “new normal” by mid-2022. Destinations are now taking a hard look at tourism and sustainability. Moving forward, it is looking like there will be some positive changes that help create a kinder, more thoughtful approach to the impact tourism has on the environments and the cultures that people visit. Travel Brilliant is already seeing this in the kind of vacation requests they have fielded recently. Would you believe that Antarctica has been the most requested destination? The company is seeing a greater emphasis on those bucket list experiences; families have been separated for many months and they are coming together to plan epic adventures. The pandemic seems to have taught people to stop putting off things they want to experience and make plans now, to seize the day. Despite the struggles that the last year or so have presented, the future is looking bright for Travel Brilliant. They are planning to add three new agent positions by the end of 2021 and are excited to see its team grow after more than a year of business being paused. And the enthusiasm for travel is far beyond anything the company could have hoped for. They are also growing their LGBTQ+ travel portfolio to focus on family travel. As the LGBTQ+ community grow their families, their travel needs are shifting away from singles’/couples’ travel. The intersection between LGBTQ+ and family friendly travel is a place Travel Brilliant feels well positioned to support. Moving into 2022 and beyond, Travel Brilliant is enthusiastically recommending the Disney Travel portfolio to their clients due to the confidence in the care they put into health and safety. Walt Disney World started welcoming back guests in July 2020 and has really led the way in health and safety standards. The “Disney bubble” feels very safe and the cast members go above and beyond to continue to make the experience magical for guests. Company: Travel Brilliant Contact: Denise Ambrusko-Maida Email: [email protected] Website: www.travelbrilliant.net