Robin Cline [00:00:13]:
Have you ever wondered how the pros put together epic tailor made travel adventures? Welcome to the Intrepid Traveler podcast. I'm your host Robin Cline, and I'm going to explain to you just how that is done during my conversation with today's guest. Envision yourself driving through the Tuscan countryside in a Ferrari, sipping champagne on a remote island in the Indian Ocean, camel trekking in Kenya, lounging in a luxury echo lodge in South America, or seeing the Southern Cross from a dark sky reserve in Australia. When it comes to luxury, adventure and expedition travel, the possibilities are endless. And in each episode, you'll hear from an expert in his or her field about how these experiences and more are created. This episode of The Intrepid Traveler is brought to you by Klein and Co Travel Consulting, a luxury adventure and expedition travel planning company specializing in ungoogleable experiences. You can find us on the Web@kleinandcotravel.com. That's Klein with A-C-C-L-I-N-E on Instagram. At Cline and Co Travel, we have a private Facebook group you're welcome to join. Or you can find us on LinkedIn or catch the video version on YouTube. With that said, let's welcome our guests to today's show. I am so glad to be back today with a great friend, a colleague, and a client. Dory Saltzman is joining me today. And normally I say what somebody's title is or their job is or something, but you've worn a lot of hats and we're going to kind of go through all those things, so I'm not going to give the title to start with. So thank you. Thanks for being here. I really appreciate it.
Dori Saltzman [00:01:56]:
Yeah, happy to be here. Love talking about travel.
Robin Cline [00:02:00]:
Good. Dori and I have met through a mutual friend in the travel business, and when we first met, I was looking for some help with copywriting because I am a terrible writer and I hate to write and it takes me forever in a year, and she does miraculous work in a very short period of time. It was a good start to our friendship, I think.
Dori Saltzman [00:02:23]:
Yeah, it was fun, too. I mean, you had me doing blog writing, so that's always fun.
Robin Cline [00:02:28]:
Exactly. Well, and it led to something that we'll talk about later when a trip that you took and into a place that you took. So we'll leave that out there. So people keep listening for a while here. Well, tell us, how did you get into writing to begin with? Like, what was the attraction for you? Just always loved it or did it happen by accident? What was the history?
Dori Saltzman [00:02:51]:
It's kind of a combination of both. I mean, I always loved writing. I've been writing ever since I was a kid, but I don't think I quite realized that it was something you could make a career out of at first. So I was doing various other things, like out of college, just worked at a nonprofit at one point. And actually my first writing job actually came during when the dot coms were taking off in the it was in fashion. Okay. And I wasn't hired necessarily to do writing. I was hired to do some of the HTML work at the time, but there was writing involved, and suddenly I realized, oh, I can take my skill as a writer and I can turn it into a career. A friend of mine worked for a travel trade publication, and so he got me a job at a travel trade publication in 2000, and I was hired as their web editor because I knew HTML at a time when a lot of people didn't necessarily know HTML, but it was a writing job. I was writing for their website, so they had their print stuff, and then I was writing on their website, so that's how I sort of kind of it was a combination of I love it, but I sort of also fell into it. And yes, that's how I got started with travel writing. Okay.
Robin Cline [00:04:02]:
All right, good. And we're going to talk about some of your travels and how you need to experience something in order to be able to write about it. Pretty much. But tell us first explain exactly what a travel trade publication is.
Dori Saltzman [00:04:16]:
Sure. So a travel trade is an industry publication. It's a professional publication. So most organizations out there have some sort of trade publication for them. So florists have a publication that's for florists that they learn about flowers or arrangements or whatever. Veterinarians have a trade publication so that they learn. So the travel agency business, the travel industry business has industry publications, and then there are also ones that are specifically for travel advisors. So I have always worked in what I call travel trade versus a travel industry publication that has been geared towards travel advisors. So it has product information, has destination information, but there's also usually information about running your business, about marketing, about hiring, things like that, that help a travel advisor have a more successful business.
Robin Cline [00:05:15]:
Right, well, and that you just said the keywords right there have a more successful business. And part of that being successful, a big part of it, is not just monetary on my part. It's being able to really successfully match my clients with the right products, the right experiences, the right places, and so forth. So having somebody like you that goes and experiences it and then can actually put it into words and make it something that I can read through quickly and makes a lot of sense and I get a good feel for it is really indispensable to me. So I appreciate that you love doing this.
Dori Saltzman [00:05:55]:
Always nice to know that what I do is appreciated.
Robin Cline [00:05:57]:
Yes, absolutely. So we talked about earlier, before we started recording, that this kind of began like around 2000, so 20 ish years ago, and then you had a little hiatus and then came back to the business again. Since then you've been pretty consistently either copywriting or doing this kind of writing, travel, trade writing. You do mostly cruises, is that correct? When you do the experience yourself, is that right?
Dori Saltzman [00:06:26]:
Yeah. When I first came back into the industry, I was pretty much a generalist and I did a lot of it, a little bit of everything. And then I went to the consumer side for a while, and that was specifically with a website called CruiseCritic.com. So I became a cruise specialist. So when I came back to the trade, I brought that expertise with me. So that is sort of one of my primary roles is to bring all the cruise expertise to travel market report. And then I also will do other things. I write what we call retail strategies. So like I said, things like marketing. I just wrote a series about carbon offsets. So for travel advisors who are interested in learning more about carbon offsets. So I do things like that in addition to the cruise. That is my expertise. And so that is sort of primarily where I do most of my work in that part of the industry.
Robin Cline [00:07:19]:
Right, okay. And that's both river cruising and ocean cruising, correct?
Dori Saltzman [00:07:23]:
Yes.
Robin Cline [00:07:23]:
Okay. And have you done any expedition stuff yet? I mean, Antarctica or Polar?
Dori Saltzman [00:07:30]:
I have not done the poles. The Arctic is high on my list. Antarctic, I will only do if I can fly cruise it because I do not want to do the drink. I have done a couple of uncruised cruises. I did a Windstar where they were trialing some expedition. Okay. I have a Lin Blad coming up, as do you. Yes.
Robin Cline [00:07:52]:
We're actually going to get to travel together.
Dori Saltzman [00:07:54]:
It's going to be so much fun. So I do have some familiarity with expedition. Okay.
Robin Cline [00:08:00]:
Luckily for me, I also follow you on social media and so you do a lot of posting when you're traveling, which is great because you could see all the pictures. And this year you've been like three or four, maybe five different cruise trips you've been on or more. Okay, maybe that's just all I've seen, but yeah, exactly. I mean, I know it's hard to say like you have favorites, but maybe tell us a little bit about some of the differences because I know you were on Oceania. Is that how you pronounce it, or am I think you were on it? Were you on Azimara?
Dori Saltzman [00:08:35]:
As was on I was not on Azimara. So this year I have been on Norwegian Princess Emerald cruises, yacht, not the river, but their yacht, avalon river. The Oceania.
Robin Cline [00:08:51]:
You didn't know there was going to be a test here. I was going to make you try to remember every cruise. Well, that's okay. You don't need to remember every one of them. The point I'm trying to get at is there are a lot of choices out there and everything from the size of the ship, the kind of food they serve, the sort of excursions they do, all of that. There's a lot of research for even somebody like me go through to do that. So as far as let's just start with the ocean cruises that you've done this year. So what has been like maybe the smaller ships that you've been on all the way up onto the bigger ones and just sort of in a nutshell, other than the obvious size, what's the difference in doing a smaller ship versus a bigger ship?
Dori Saltzman [00:09:38]:
Right, so the two smallest trips, two smallest ships that I did this year would be the Avalon View River Cruise, which was a brand new ship for them. And then the Emerald Azura, which is their brand new yacht product. The Emerald Azura is 100 people. I cannot remember what Avalon view is. Maybe a couple hundred.
Robin Cline [00:09:57]:
Right?
Dori Saltzman [00:09:58]:
So those are smaller and even those are going to be different from each other because one's on a river and one was in the Mediterranean, in the Adriatic specifically. There were a lot of similarities actually between them. And I think it's because Emerald has a river design. The design was a little bit like a river feel. So there's one main dining room, no specialty restaurant, although they had an outer deck sort of cafe, but it's intimate. You get to know the people that are on the ship with you, you're going to see the same people time and time again. So that's one thing about small ships is like, it really is a social environment. I mean, you can be antisocial if you want, but I mean, it is a social environment and you are going to see the same people. There's no assigned dining or anything. Chances are you're going to meet people who you're going to end up sitting with. There might be empty chairs at dinner and you're going to be like, hey, can I sit with you? And you're going to meet new people. So it's very much a sort of extroverted social thing to be on small ships like that. The service is also usually there's fewer people and there's usually maybe not a one to one, maybe a two to one guest to staff ratio or staff to guest ratio. It's usually like there's a higher level of the service as well. Food is also, again, like when a chef is making less meals, food is going to tend to be a little bit better. Those are sort of the main things about those smaller ships. They were very much determined by sort of the destination that we were in. One was an inaugural sailing, so one whole day was taken up with Christening activities, but otherwise we were in Hungary and Slovenia. And so Avalon has a number of different kinds of excursions. I like active, so I sort of focused on the active. The emerald Azura. We were in Croatia and Albania. We did go to Montenegro and then Greece and then a whole bunch of stops in, you know, that really kind of dictated what we did there. As in, especially in Greece, like water based things. And the way they do things is very much like kind of sort of design your own. There were a couple of excursions, but you could mostly kind of do your own thing. Then on the opposite side in the middle, like the largest to the smallest. Then I was on Virgin voyages, which is okay. They've been around for a year now. I want to say they're about 2500 people, maybe, right?
Robin Cline [00:12:28]:
No, that sounds about right. Yeah.
Dori Saltzman [00:12:31]:
That was completely different from any kind of cruise I've done, which I wasn't expecting. I really thought there was a lot of hot air, but it really was very different. It is, even though it's bigger, a very extroverted cruise line. People want to get to know each other. People want to have fun. It really is about having fun. There's no kids, which, of course, there were no kids on the yacht or the river cruise either. But it's very much an adult. Yeah. Food on there was absolutely fantastic. They have a whole bunch of different included restaurants. We had so much fun trying out different restaurants. Our favorite place ended up being a tapas place toward the back of the ship. We must have had that four times.
Robin Cline [00:13:11]:
Oh, my gosh.
Dori Saltzman [00:13:12]:
Five day cruise fun. And it only had a couple of stops, not a lot of excursion options. So really was like just enjoying the ship. Then on the larger side, let's say I just got off Norwegian Prima. So that's their brand new ship. Although that's also only 31 passengers. But it's a bigger ship. I was also on Discovery Princess earlier in the year. That's a bigger ship. And that's your traditional cruise. Exactly. Where you can meet some people. A few people. But you're not certainly not going to meet everybody on the cruise with you. You're pretty much going to hang out with the people that you came on the ship with.
Robin Cline [00:13:53]:
Right.
Dori Saltzman [00:13:53]:
You're going to partake in typical cruise activities, whether it's trivia or bingo, going to the shows at night. There's a larger selection of excursions depending on where you are. So that's your traditional when people sort of think about cruising, that's your traditional cruising thing. They're definitely all different.
Robin Cline [00:14:14]:
Yeah. No, absolutely. That was great because I think something that I sometimes struggle with explaining like doing a very good job of explaining that succinctly. And like you said, most people think of cruising as it's the giant floating city with 7500 people and you're like and that has always been my reaction to it, too. I've only ever been on two ocean cruises. But now that I'm learning more about all of these different things and I'm sending more clients on different cruises to different places and all that, I am much more open minded about it than I was before. Because there are places I'm sure you found, like in the Baltics. There are places that you really I mean, you could go without being on a cruise, but it's not going to be really easy to get there unless you're on a cruise. I think Alaska is another place like that, that there are spots that places in Alaska you're going to go on a cruise that you're getting there by land. Your only other choice is going to be by air. And so it makes some places accessible that wouldn't be otherwise.
Dori Saltzman [00:15:23]:
Right. And I think it's also important to remember for travel advisors in particular and even for me, our biases aren't other people's biases. So I love the big ships. I like the small ships, too. And I love expedition cruising, but I love big ships. I like having a lot to do. I don't want to have to entertain myself. I want to be entertained. As you were saying before, one of the most important things is matching people to the right experience. I loved the Oceania experience. I was just on mostly because the destination was amazing. If I had done that experience in the Caribbean, I personally would have been bored because there wasn't enough activity to do. Whereas Norwegian prima there's so many activities to do in the theater shows and people want different things when they're know we're going to talk about the trip that I said. Depending on what kind of trip you're taking, it also changes what somebody might want to do.
Robin Cline [00:16:20]:
Exactly.
Dori Saltzman [00:16:21]:
The great thing about cruise ships is there's a cruise ship for every type of person.
Robin Cline [00:16:26]:
Yeah, and that's true, I guess, other than somebody who just gets deathly ill at the sight of water. Other than that, there really is something for everybody. And I'm so grateful that you're out there writing about it all because I could never in a million years experience every bit of it. And I've been able to guide some clients to some pretty successful both river and ocean expedition cruising because of your expertise, people like you. So thank you.
Dori Saltzman [00:17:04]:
And by the way, when you said the thing about the water, I take boning because you get seasick doesn't mean you can't do a cruise.
Robin Cline [00:17:12]:
Right, that's true. And now that they've got those patches like you see people on the ships wearing those little patches behind their ears all the time, I think that's been a game changer because it's not like dramamine where you're completely drunk or dead from the drugs for hours on end and just feeling groggy and everything else. So they have come up with some things now that can make it better for people that might have that motion problem. Okay. You had a significant birthday this year. You turned 50, and we planned together a safari for you because that was something that was on your bucket list and you got to do that. So that was obviously nothing like a cruise.
Dori Saltzman [00:17:58]:
Nothing like a cruise. And it was funny because my whole family did this together. And I kept getting phone calls from my dad or my sister being like, ask me questions about how to prepare, what to do. And I was like, I don't know, I've never done this before. It's not like a cruise. I've got to do my own research. It was nothing like anything I'd ever done before, which was kind of exciting.
Robin Cline [00:18:27]:
Yeah, absolutely. And you had some absolutely amazing wildlife sightings on your trip. You really did. You got to see a lot and do a lot. You were in Tanzania and different camps and all of that. That was an exciting trip. And it was really fun for me. I mean, I enjoy all my clients for the most part. Sorry, caveat one or two sometimes.
Dori Saltzman [00:18:56]:
But.
Robin Cline [00:18:57]:
It'S really fun for me to work with you and your family and that that was such a big bucket list item that you were wanting to check off. And like, we're talking about the matchmaking aspect of it. Like, you understand with the cruises, all the questions that need to be asked, all the planning, what are the things you got to have? What do you not necessarily have to have? What are the things you don't want at all? And then put it all together and make it something that works for a multi generational.
Dori Saltzman [00:19:29]:
Yeah, as think, I mean, you picked hills of Africa for us, and they were mean. They put together a really great itinerary. Our guide was I just can't say enough about our guide, penwell Tango, and he made the trip. I mean, you talk about the wildlife sightings, we would not have had half of those without his knowledge of the places that we were and where to go that might have been off the beaten path. All our Cheetah sightings were in a place that very few people actually go. It was the perfect operator.
Robin Cline [00:20:09]:
That's awesome. And yeah, on safaris, absolutely. The guide is what's going to make it or break it, for sure. Absolutely. It's also interesting because I think that you mentioned earlier being kind of a generalist as far as a writer goes. And for me, I mean, I definitely have my specialties. There are certain places, Africa Safaris are one of them. South America, australia. New Zealand. But then there are a lot of places like, you know, like we talked about every cruise, every country in Europe, every everything. So it's knowing when you need to have somebody to depend on to help you work something like that out, like it's as experienced a traveler as you are, you knew when it came time to plan that, that it was like, okay, I'm going to need some help here.
Dori Saltzman [00:21:04]:
And even if in my mind I'd like to do another safari, I would still use a travel advisor that is not the kind of thing I would ever plan on my own, because I'm not going to get the same. If you're going to go that far, if you're going to spend that much money, make it the best you can. And I can't do that. A travel advisor, an expert has to do that.
Robin Cline [00:21:23]:
Exactly. Well, you had something you had a trip on your 40th and a trip on your 50th, which were cruises. So you got more than one 50th birthday trip. And I'm just saying that's not fair. But tell us what happened, because that's a cool story. I like that.
Dori Saltzman [00:21:43]:
So for my 40th birthday, I did a family cruise on Norwegian Gem, and we just went from New York City down to Florida in the Bahamas. Not anything exotic or anything, but that was my 40th. And then for my 50th birthday, I happened to be on Emerald Azora, which was the 100 passenger yacht. And I was with a friend. This was a work trip, and I was with a friend, and I cannot remember, unfortunately, what port we were in. Oh, no. We were in Greece. That we were in Greece somewhere. And coming back, having been out and about coming back, the Emerald Azora is docked there, and then there's the Gem. And it was just like and it took me a minute, and I was like, that's the ship I was on for my 40th birthday, and here's the ship I'm on for my 50th. And I don't know. I don't know what the universe was trying to say, but it felt like it was some sort of right. Right.
Robin Cline [00:22:37]:
Everything. Lyle the stars lined up to have that happen. That's funny. I love things like that when they happen.
Dori Saltzman [00:22:43]:
It was amazing.
Robin Cline [00:22:44]:
Yeah. Thank you so much, Dory. This has been great, and I really, really appreciate all your talents, your expertise, and your time today. Thank you.
Dori Saltzman [00:22:56]:
Yeah, no problem. Thank you.
Robin Cline [00:22:58]:
That wraps up today's episode of The Intrepid Traveler. Thank you for listening or watching, and thank you to today's guests for joining me. I'll be back again in two weeks with another exciting episode featuring another guest with a story that is sure to pique your interest. Please subscribe to The Intrepid Traveler and give us a review. Once again, today's episode has been brought to you by Travel Consulting, a luxury adventure and expedition travel planning company specializing in ungoolable experiences.