Virtuoso Travel Week is tagged as “The Fashion Week for Travel”.
This is likely an apt comparison, as 6000 luxury travel advisors (mostly women) descend on Vegas, to meet travel vendors, learn, and find out what’s new in the world of travel.
Bob and I attended Travel Week again this year, and had vowed to post regularly so you could share our experience. However, there’s something about being scheduled from 6:00 in the morning until 11:00 at night that quickly forces everything else to become a second priority.
I have a few updates that I will share over the coming weeks, but first, a story.
Lindblad Expeditions is a company that does expedition style cruising very well. They are best known for their partnership with National Geographic.
Their story of “Kevin” captured my heart last week.
The story starts with a short video taken by some Lindblad guests during their Antarctica cruise.
I’m afraid that I can’t adequately describe the tension-filled drama with words alone, so if you’re interested, you can watch the video for yourself, here: https://youtu.be/2J8BUXV_VTk
The video shows a pod of Orca Whales attempting to knock a seal off a piece of ice.
The whales work in unison to try to dislodge the seal, but every time they manage to bump him off the ice, he scrambles back on before they have a chance to rip him in two.
After watching the first few attempts, I wondered if the fine folks at Lindblad were going to show us first-hand how the food chain works. I watched the video with horror, spellbound.
Although the video footage is only a couple of minutes long, it was edited down from about two hours of live action taken from the deck of a Lindblad ship by sympathetic passengers. The passengers nicknamed the seal “Kevin”, and cheered for his ultimate survival.
After some time, Kevin makes a successful run for it, and escapes the aggressive Orcas once and for all.
Disaster averted – and none of us city-dwellers actually had to witness Mother Nature doing what she does best (thank goodness).
But that’s not the end of the story.
The Lindblad folks concluded their video presentation at Virtuoso Travel Week by handing out “Go Kevin Go!” buttons. In a stroke of marketing genius, they leveraged the ‘Kevin’ story, and promised us that every time they spotted one of us wearing our Kevin button, they would scan the barcode on it… and the person with the most scans at the end of the week would win a trip to Antarctica with Lindblad Expeditions.
Of course, this meant I spent every unscheduled moment of Virtuoso Travel Week stalking the Lindblad folks (sorry Lesa).
I was told that some people would even follow them into the restrooms looking to have their Kevin badges scanned (ewwwww). I opted instead to sleep in the hallway outside their hotel rooms – ‘cause the toilet thing is just a bit too creepy.
If you see me blogging from Antarctica in the New Year, you’ll know I was successful. Cross your fingers!
Thanks Kevin.
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I look forward to hearing from you.
Sue Bradley
Sue Bradley
