We were lucky to catch up with Amanda Persi recently and have shared our conversation below.

Amanda, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. How did you come up with the idea for your business?

Working as a publicist in the music industry in Toronto, Canada was a dream. I loved every minute of my career, but in 2014 after 13 rewarding years, I walked into my boss’s office and told him I was moving to Switzerland.

I had no real plan, no job and no viable prospects. But I knew I wanted to live in Europe, learn a second language and that hard work would result in magical things, as it often does.

Finding a job was hard, but I did manage to work in a few roles that provided the inspiration for my next venture. That, combined with traveling Europe as a vegan, it was easy to see there was a clear hole in the travel market for cruelty free, plant-based holiday experiences.

I knew it was time to take my experience and create a business that would help inspire people to go plant-based while simultaneously making them feel like they’re part of a supportive community.

Working with local people and creating jobs in the destinations The Getaway Co. visit is one of the most important things we do. Almost everyone we work with subscribes to a plant-based lifestyle and they are instrumental in planning our inspiring events.

Partnering with Animal Welfare companies in countries where the stray animal population is out of control is also very close to our hearts and another driving factor in The Getaway Co.’s existence. The tireless work of BAWA in Bali inspires us to work harder every single day.

I live my life plant-based because I believe that animals deserve to be treated kindly, fairly and with compassion. I don’t believe that they deserve to be treated as products, abused and exploited.

I have had the privilege of being able to travel the world, experience different cultures and meet wonderful people that I have learned from and been inspired by. The Getaway Co. is my way of offering this same experience to an international community of people that are interested in living a plant-based lifestyle. Our experiences provide the opportunity to reflect on life at home, focus on compassion, become immersed in an amazing culture, connect with a group of like-minded people while having a ton of fun.

My hope for each group that I am lucky enough to connect with is that they walk away feeling refreshed, engaged, enlightened, inspired and that they have a new group of friends around the globe who feel the same way that they do.

Amanda, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I’m the founder of a completely plant-based holiday company called The Getaway Co. We organize cruelty-free/vegan holiday experiences around the world. Each year we add new locations and at the moment we have annual trips to: Bali, Italy, Portugal, Greece, Croatia and Morocco. We also host occasional trips to Switzerland and last year we hosted “The Vegan Mega Trip” which took us to London, Paris and Berlin. Next year we’re working to add trips to Spain and Thailand to our itinerary.

Traveling as a vegan can be incredibly challenging as your trip often becomes about finding something to eat, rather than enjoying the local culture to the fullest. The Getaway Co. seeks to remedy this problem by organizing all-inclusive experiences that allow our guests to focus on what’s truly important while traveling. We’ve also worked to create a supportive community of vegan travellers who now join us annually and coordinate with each other to meet in our various destinations around the world. Our community is the life blood of our business and definitely what I am the most proud of as the company founder.

How did you build your audience on social media?

The Getaway Co. doesn’t have a particularly huge following on social media, but we have certainly leveraged social media marketing to build our business from day 1.

When I decided to start The Getaway Co. in early 2018, it was my intention to market our holidays via digital advertising as is to be expected by any business. I then went home to Canada for a visit and met my very close friend Lauren Toyota who is a long time vegan content creator for her brand hot for food, and has been an incredible inspiration in the vegan community for many years. We sat down to lunch and I told her all about my plan to launch the first trip in Bali as I’d worked there previously and had lots of knowledge of it as a getaway location. Without hesitation, Lauren said “yup, I want to go to Bali, let’s partner on this and I’ll promote the trip via my social media channels!”

We planned the launch of our very first event early in 2019 for a getaway in Bali that coming June. Lauren posted on her various social media channels and within 24 hours we had over 100 applications for an event with 20 spots. And just like that, we had started to build our fabulous vegan travel community! We now travel with vegan creators on all of our events where they do cooking demos and bring even more knowledge and joy to each experience. Some of our regular partners include Richard Makin from School Night Vegan, Nick Cutsumpas aka Farmer Nick and Erin Ireland who owns Vancouver vegan bakery “To Live For”.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

Having launched a travel company in 2019 and then being hit by a pandemic in 2020, there is no more obvious tale of resilience for us and our travel community.

2020 was hard, and obviously travel was out of the question. The pandemic tested our patience and ability to stay focused and resilient as much as it possibly could have. But we kept our eye on the prize, stayed in touch with our community via social media and continued to postpone our trips until we knew it would be possible to run them again. We had many customers stick with us and simply shift their deposits to future trips. We’re forever grateful to them.

And I think when you have an ethically focused business based on your own passions, you have an innate drive to fight for what you believe in, which in this case, lent itself to the resilience we needed to make it through the pandemic.

Contact Info:

• Website: thegetawayco.com
• Instagram: @thegetawayco
• Facebook: facebook.com/thegetawayco
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKohXFNwtsy361Q9BVl_kAQ

Image Credits
Stema Journeys Greece Gianni Aiazzi Italy Chantelle Flores Switzerland Alexander Pflaum Bali