We recently connected with Rebecca Garland and have shared our conversation below.
Alright, Rebecca thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Let’s start with the story of your mission. What should we know?
My company, Fit & Fly, hosts women’s retreats in locations around the world. I founded the company a few years after attending fitness retreats myself. During the first retreat I ever attended, I was sitting around a circle on the first day as the other retreat guests introduced themselves, and I had the thought, “I’ve found my people.” I was at a point in my life where I was feeling lost, and to suddenly meet and spend a week with other like-minded women who immediately felt like friends was like nothing I had ever experienced before. I created Fit & Fly for women to feel empowered through travel and to take time to care for themselves mind, body, and spirit, but there was another element of it too. As I’d experienced myself as a retreat guest, the connections with the other women on the retreat are what I really wanted to create for our guests, and we’ve done exactly that. Many times, our retreat guests are traveling solo, and they form incredibly strong bonds within the week with the other retreat guests, often staying close friends after the retreat is over and providing them with future travel partners to continue exploring the world. There is no better gift we can give women.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your background and context?
I am an attorney, but just a few years into practicing law I realized I needed a creative outlet, a passion. I began a series of side hustles to keep me feeling inspired. I was a freelance writer. I wrote a novel. I acted in commercials. And then I began traveling.
In 2009, I took a three-month solo trip to the UK and Europe. I had never traveled solo before. It was on that trip that I first understood how travel and getting out of your comfort zone can be life changing. I began taking solo trips to other places like Southeast Asia and Cuba. But I realized I was missing connection with people, and though I was nervous about traveling with strangers, I booked my first fitness retreat – a surf and yoga retreat in Bali.
During that Bali retreat, I finally felt like I had found my people, a group of like-minded women who understood me and my love of travel. I immediately booked another retreat – this time to Tulum, Mexico. I was sitting on the beach one day in Tulum when I had the idea to start a company that offered traveling retreats so that our guests could experience a different location each time.
It took a couple of years, but after going through a major transition in my life, my business partner and I launched Fit & Fly in 2014. We’ve hosted hundreds of women on dozens of retreats on five continents. Our week-long retreats are generally hosted in a private villa with a personal chef and a variety of activities that are specific to the location such as learning how to play polo in Buenos Aires, making your own perfume in the French Riviera, or camel riding in Morocco. Some of our retreats are fitness-based where we have a fitness instructor offering daily fitness classes for our guests.
When we founded Fit & Fly, there were several yoga retreats but not as many fitness retreats, so that was one thing that set us apart. Now there are more fitness retreats available, but we only offer women’s retreats, so that’s another difference. Many retreat companies are specific to one location, but we travel the world and provide those experiences to our guests. I would say the biggest thing that sets us apart from other retreat companies, though, is that our guests receive a highly detailed, personalized experience so that they basically only need to show up. Everything is already thought of and taken care of for them in advance.
In the beginning, I traveled on all of the retreats, but because I practice law full time, I am only able to attend one or two retreats per year at this point. We have assembled a team of retreat hosts, fitness instructors, photographers, personal chefs, and wellness practitioners, all of whom I have the utmost trust in to care for our guests, which means everything to me especially when I can’t be there.
What I am most proud of… Many of our guests who attend our retreats are going through something – a divorce, recently widowed, a job transition, moving across the country, or another major life change. Being able to give women a chance to take a minute to breathe and be cared for by someone else while making connections to other women is amazing. So many women have said to me after the retreat is over, “This week changed my life.” It’s incredible to be able to provide this experience.
Where do you think you get most of your clients from?
Our best source of new clients has been both word of mouth and press we’ve received. In the beginning when we first founded Fit & Fly, there was no word of mouth, of course, since no one knew us. Back then, we had to rely on our website/SEO, social media, and personally trying to spread the word. We never hired a PR agency, so it was completely on us to do the work. We were lucky in that a few publications ran across us organically and featured us – Travel + Leisure magazine, New York Times, Shape magazine, and Well + Good, among others. Kate Hudson’s brand, Fabletics, also found us a few years ago, and we entered into a one-year brand partnership with them. All of those things drove people to Fit & Fly’s website and to book retreats with us. In the past few years, it’s been our repeat guests telling their friends about Fit & Fly that have become our best source of new clients. After all, when your friend is telling you what a great experience they had on a retreat, that helps create instant trust for the brand. It’s been amazing. Plus we love our guests and are excited when they come back to join us and bring their friends with them!
Can you open up about a time when you had a really close call with the business?
COVID was extremely hard on our business, just as it was for every other travel business – and for so many other types of businesses as well. Right when COVID was beginning to shut everything down, we had just been gearing up to host a retreat in Italy, a COVID hotspot. Obviously that didn’t happen nor did any of our other retreats planned for 2020. We pushed all of those retreats to 2021, thinking that we’d be able to host them by then, and then began having to cancel each of those one by one as well. Finally, we were able to host an Iceland retreat in September 2021. It was so hard to know what was the right thing to do, trying to balance the safety of our guests with the safety of our team with the safety of people in the location where we were traveling. Travel finally seems to be back in a big way, and we’ve just wrapped up hosting three retreats this spring to Palm Springs, French Riviera, and Ibiza, Spain. We have four retreats planned for this fall to Iceland, Tuscany, Abu Dhabi and Dubai, and Morocco.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.fitandflygirl.com
- Instagram: @fitandflygirl (and my personal Instagram dedicated to travel, @msadventuress)
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/fitandflygirl
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rebecca-garland
- Twitter: @fitandflygirl
Image Credits
Bree McCool John Herr