We recently connected with Angela Rice and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Angela , thanks for joining us today. Let’s kick things off with your mission – what is it and what’s the story behind why it’s your mission?

I am thrilled to share my story behind Boutique Travel Advisors in 2017. With a passion for travel and a desire to elevate the professionalism of travel advisors, we embarked on a mission to create a unique advisory firm that would not only provide exceptional service but also enrich the lives of our clients through more meaningful travel experiences.

Drawing upon my background as a strategic business consultant, I recognized the importance of equipping our employed and independent advisors with the necessary skills to thrive in the industry. We are dedicated to helping our team increase their knowledge in areas such as marketing, sales, operations, and the client experience. By providing comprehensive training and support, we empower our advisors to achieve both professional and personal success.

Prior to co-founding Boutique Travel Advisors with my business partner, Janet Semenova, I worked in consulting as a forensic accounting and business strategist for almost two decades. This was an intense environment and required that I find other outlets to create an enriching work-life. While much of my time outside of work is focused on family and friends, I found my passions in philanthropy, travel and mentoring other professionals. When I met Janet, a nurse practitioner, we discovered that our long-term career goals were similar and that we had unique synergies. Knowing how businesses succeed and what makes them profitable, I had a good sense in meeting Janet that our shared vision would be successful. As we added more advisors to our team in our first few years, we began to focus our attention on the value of coaching and training others. During the pandemic, we began to formalize this mentoring and training program under the name Centered CEOs. Our business has grown into a team of advisors that are highly specialized based on destination niches and other specialties such as ultra-luxury travel, corporate executive retreats and multi-generational travel.

I am incredibly proud of the team we have assembled at Boutique Travel Advisors, who are credited with enriching the lives of our clients using our unique approach to curating traveling experiences. We are redefining the travel industry by combining professionalism, expertise, and a genuine passion for creating transformative travel experiences.

In 2022, we joined the well-respected travel consortium Virtuoso. We have expanded our services to include more corporate travel offerings, such as our paid-paid employee benefits niche. We also found a creative solution to service clients who want more control over their travel arrangements or who do not need a high-touch service by introducing our travel coach concept.

We are anticipating another year of double-digit growth in 2024. This will be achieved through greater use of technology, increased productivity gained from our commitment to processes and procedures, delegation and workflow management, ongoing training, and onboarding specialized advisors and travel coaches with unique backgrounds that complement travel.

Janet and I faced much adversity during the pandemic, working countless hours with clients to ensure we maximized their refunds from canceled trips. While we knew other industries were slowed during this world event and people were laid off, it was quite unusual coming from medicine (Janet) and accounting (Angie), where we were either paid or billed for our time, to be putting in long hours canceling and rebooking travel plans for our clients for no compensation.

This experience helped us reshape the future of Boutique Travel Advisors, and we now charge higher service fees to ensure that we will receive some compensation for our work even if our client’s trips are canceled. We are also diversifying our business model to include a consulting business where we can educate and coach travel advisors on best practices for marketing, sales and operations. Our long-term goal is to share our MAPS (Mindful, Assertive, Profitable, Sustainable) framework, which we utilize internally at Boutique Travel Advisors with other business owners. We want to offer our consulting services to travel professionals but also other services based industries, knowing we can relate also to medical and accounting professionals.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

My professional career began in marketing, where I worked for a small publishing and public relations firm. I quickly realized that I could advance my career if I combined  my marketing degree with accounting and an opportunity to approach business analytics creatively. I applied for a consulting position with a firm, knowing that the work required a degree in economics, accounting or finance. Somehow, I managed to be hired without this degree on the condition that I would complete more accounting coursework and earn my CPA. I worked in consulting for almost two decades, servicing an array of companies from Fortune 100 companies to start-up businesses, and gained exposure working in many industries (manufacturing, construction, banking and more). The dispute resolution component of my past work was where I excelled the most, but I didn’t like the hostility between the parties negotiating their economic damages.

This environment taught me that pursuing profits over vision and values was not good and that a company needed to balance profitability with integrity, passion, authenticity and other attributes to become a sustainable company. While not everyone can afford to overlook profits to start a business, when we prioritize our core visions and mission, the profits will come, and you will be successful.

I am most proud of Boutique Travel Advisors offering travel services that enrich our clients’ lives while also providing a positive impact on the destinations and people where they travel. We also focus on servicing a greater community, including travelers who may never use our travel services. We are committed to providing travel content on our website, blog and social media and participating in philanthropy in our local communities and around the world. We also explore opportunities to educate consumers on sustainable and transformative travel.

It has not been easy navigating the travel agency industry over our company’s tenure. This is a relationship-based industry, and being new to a relationship-based industry requires that you invest time and money into building credibility and trust for clients and also our suppliers to entrust that are prior professionals and our travel knowledge from personal travel would allow us to better service their needs than perhaps even better than more seasoned travel advisors. Our approach to personalizing the client journey and our strategic approach to choosing travel partners that align with our niches have created increased value for our clients and suppliers, thereby, our business.

We also faced adversity due to world events, including the pandemic, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the current state of the Isreali-Palestinian conflict. We learned to pivot during challenging times in business. The hardship these unfathomable events have on others is far greater than the loss we’ve endured as a company. The compassion we’ve shown others during these most challenging times in our company’s history has proven that a commitment to core values, vision and mission over profits makes you a sustainable success story.

My personal goal is to build a travel company that will serve as a vessel for other important initiatives that matter to me personally but also to my business partner and others in our business. My future will focus more on helping other professionals and businesses better serve their clients and community through best practices. I will (somewhat) jokingly tell my business partner and employees that I need you to be the forest (Janet), each advisor to be a tree, and our support team to find their role by watering the trees or picking the apples. I see my role as watching out for forest fires, and to do this, I need to invest more time in external affairs that can benefit our company, the travel industry and other businesses in and outside of travel.

Any advice for managing a team?

My career has been centered around professional services, which has taught me the value of human connections and the goodwill employees and consults provide an organization. I grew up in a family business in manufacturing, and as a consultant, I was exposed to industries that involved products, services, technology and innovation. Still, human capital is the greatest asset of any company.

I have always valued mentoring others, even early in my career. I supervised employees throughout my career who have far exceeded me in their business achievements. I like to say I had a tiny part in their success.

Our team is my biggest priority. While I may not want our clients to hear this, it’s true. Hopefully, our clients will understand the logic behind this priority. I firmly believe that if we better our knowledge, expertise, communication skills and overall professionalism, our clients will continue to repeat and refer, others will take note, and our success will continue.

While my team’s focus is on servicing their clients, their personal aspirations and long-term career goals are critical. I want them to know they can always come to me for leadership advisor and express a need to pivot from their current responsibilities and position, even if this means pursuing opportunities outside of Boutique Travel Advisors.

We extend our regard for employee welfare, morale and loyalty to our corporate clients through our corporate services, including executive and team-building retreats, incentive travel and paid-paid vacation benefits.

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

When my children were five and eight, my husband had the opportunity to accept a promotion with a new company. His position required a commitment to travel and longer work hours attending networking and industry events. As a family, we accepted this position, knowing I would need to set more boundaries around my consulting work. My husband and I prioritized his career for five to six years, but he never underminded or overlooked my value during this period. When it came time to launch our travel business, my husband was able to take on more of the family responsibilities and it also helped that my sons were becoming more independent. I was acclimated to working long and scattered hours and also traveling, from managing and juggling a consulting career with two young children and no family nearby. When it came time to launch Boutique Travel Advisors, I was ready and eager to turn it into a small success story with different chapters, but also well aware of the hurdles and challenges that we would meet us along the way.

I commend my husband for excelling in his marketing executive career, while also providing our family the support it needed so that Janet and I could create something unique in Boutique Travel Advisors.

I advise choosing your partners wisely, both in your personal and professional life. I am forever thankful to my husband, Adam, and much gratitude to my business partner, Janet. They both accept the raw me in a way that allows me to channel my inner strength and take risks in how I approach business ideas and strategies. We’re successful together.

As part of our MAPS framework, Janet and I follow the mantra – elevate, delegate, replicate. This mantra isn’t always possible in growth mode or during tough times, although it keeps us motivated and hopeful. We are happy and optimistic about the future, knowing we have this focus!

Contact Info:

• Website: https://travelbta.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/travelbta
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/travelbta/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/87759920/admin/feed/posts/
• Other: Blog: https://travelbta.com/luxury-blog/