We recently connected with Angela Douglas and have shared our conversation below.
Alright, Angela thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. We’d love to hear how you think where to draw the line in terms of asking friends and family to support your business – what’s okay and what’s over the line?
Generally, a passion becomes a career and following the creation of a business, friends and family show support. When we started our travel agency, we already had the desire to explore the world and wanted to share that. We saw that sharing our travels through social media was an amazing way to let others know what travel options were out there. This was especially true for families, with younger children, who thought travel was too difficult. With our customer base present and with many already backing our endeavors, we just had to continue to spread the travel word. We found that many people believed that using a travel agent was a luxury afforded to the wealthy, when that couldn’t be farther from the truth. A travel agent can save people time and money, in a world where both are in short supply. As young parents, we remembered searching for hours for the best deal and at times having buyer’s remorse thinking a better option was available. We wanted to eliminate that for our clients and this is something we have succeeded at.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
As a family of five, traveling is our passion. As a couple, prior to children, we had loved to cruise and visit new places. Once we started to have children money was tight, however we made it a point to prioritize travel over new cars, new furniture and nice clothes. We knew that we would have these kids for 18 years and that every trip was so important. Investing in travel was something that we could do as a family to become closer and experience new and different cultures. We began to document our family travels, via YouTube, a family travel blog, and Tik Tok. Around the same time, we began to receive more and more questions from friends and family, regarding which destinations to travel to, how to travel with kids, and which sites were the best to find travel deals. We also realized that we were giving so many recommendations that starting a travel agency, just seemed right. This is when the idea of Perfect Misadventures social media became Perfect Misadventures Travel. Our goal was to help families experience travel together. Our company specializes in which resorts, cruise lines, and even flights are best for families with young children. We knew what travel had done for our family and wanted to share that with others.
Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?
One of the hardest things our family encountered, was the pandemic and the lockdowns. As a family, we had booked a trip to China in early 2019 and were set to leave mid-March 2020. In December 2019, we were traveling in Mexico and were following the virus closer than many in the states. Many of our friends and family still had not heard of it at this point or had heard of the it and it was never thought it would come to the states. We were scheduled to travel to the country where the virus started. We had spent countless hours booking flights, train rides, tours, and hotels. The big surprise for our kids was to spend the day at Shanghai Disney. By the beginning of January, we knew that we would need to cancel the trip, and the disappointment was real. We were scared, all current activities including school and sports along with any future travel was also cancelled. However, during the lockdown we spent much time focusing on our family travel blog, our YouTube channel and our Instagram. We began to grow and that is also when we decided to start our travel agency. We learned that sometimes the best ideas come from events that you wished never happened.
Any advice for growing your clientele? What’s been most effective for you?
We knew we had to get back into traveling. We started the travel agency after social media and word of mouth brought clients to us. We wanted to show our clients that we felt safe traveling internationally and so should they. We had not taken a flight from December 2019 through August of 2020. We were nervous; however, we had a bag of masks, we sanitized our airplane seats, and we maintained social distance as best we could. We felt very safe traveling back to Mexico and were very impressed by the precautions taken by the country and the resort. They asked everyone to sanitize their hands after entering a building, there were sanitizer mats for your shoes, and rooms were cleaned and remained empty for a night to ensure they were virus free. The most impressive thing we saw were the precautions taken by the staff. They had masks, face shields, and gloves and had maintained their distance from guests the best they could. We wanted to make sure we felt safe traveling in order to ensure that our clients would feel safe traveling as well. After word got out that we had traveled internationally, post COVID, our clients also began to feel safe traveling. It was such a great feeling after staying in the house for months. Our business began to take off and we had clients traveling the world.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://perfectmisadventures.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/perfectmisadventures/?hl=en
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/PerfectMisadventures?app=desktop
- Other: Tik Tok https://www.tiktok.com/@perfectmisadventures5
Image Credits
Kristin Camfferman took the main photo and photos 1,8 and 9 as well. The rest were taken by our family.