Good evening all. Hope everyone is safe at home (or in the case of my son and sons-in-law staying safe at work). We are doing well here and have had only one of our close friends contract the  virus and get sick and that person is doing well now.

Now to the big change. After much thought, stress and now relief we have severed our relationship with Expedia CruiseShipCenters of Redmond and started anew with Expedia CruiseShipCenters of Bellevue. It had become apparent over the last few months that as much as we were not happy in Redmond, the owner was not happy with us. So we felt this was a good move. We are THRILLED with the owner we will be working with in Bellevue. And he is OK with us working remotely from home which is what we really want to do since 80% of our clients have been friends and family who do not live locally. That doesn’t mean we won’t ever be in the office but just that there won’t be the pressure to be there and stare at the walls.

We discussed quitting travel consulting all together but I just LOVE helping people travel so we decided to see if we could find another place to land. We discussed leaving Expedia CruiseShipCenters completely but decided since we knew the systems and didn’t want to have to reeducate ourselves if we could help it, we would try and find an owner who saw things more the way we do. Our new owner in Bellevue absolutely does. We have had two long phone calls with him and our Zoom discussion yesterday lasted more than two hours as we got to know each other.

So if you have travel needs, just e-mail me at jbellomo@cruiseshipcenters.com or call my cell at 206-399-0846 and I can set you up. More about this change in the weeks ahead.

Best travel quote for these Covid times

The other day while out for one of my walks I was listening to the podcast, “The Daily” from the New York Times. On the weekdays they pretty much run in-depth hard news but on the weekends they post human interest stuff. Last Saturday they interviewed travel guru Rick Steves. You can hear it by clicking here. If you don’t feel like listening for an hour, then here’s the best travel thing I have heard during this entire Covid period in our lives, when everyone is either cancelling their travel or having their travel cancelled. This is what Rick had to say about all those travel cancellations:

It’s OK to cancel your travel plans. Just don’t cancel your travel dreams. —Rick Steves

That about sums it up for us. We know in our hearts that our August Galapagos trip is going to be cancelled. In fact the airline we are flying from LAX to Quito cancelled us (only on one leg of the return flight 🤫 which is weird) and we are just waiting for Celebrity to cancel our Flora cruise. But we still want to go there and will rebook it for sometime next year. It’s one of our travel dreams. We won’t lose those. You shouldn’t either.