Greetings from Trafalgar Square, London!
I'm back on the go again, from the slopes of Mount Etna just a few days ago, to here in London for a brief stop en route back to Toronto for a few weeks.
The last few months of relative stability on our LiveAway programs were absolutely wonderful, but now it's time to make some moves to keep things moving for Wheel & Anchor. We have a long list of trips to be released and it's finally time to expand our small team so we can keep pace with our growing community.
As you can imagine, we have been running things with a skeleton crew for the past few years while waiting for travel to return. Even though we knew the surge of demand would outpace both supply and our ability to grow as a team, such things are nearly impossible to time and thus we are slightly behind in our new trip releases and bringing new team members on board.
If you've reached out recently and haven't received a reply as promptly as usual, please bear with us for a just a little bit longer - we will get back to everyone and will do our absolute best to get you on the trips you desire.
We are about to finally add some new members to our team (!), but just like with this community, it's about the right people joining us and so we can't quite scale this as quickly as the calls and emails can come in.
Generally speaking this is challenge of the travel industry as a whole - everything moving and in flux, and demand vastly outpacing both supply and the ability to service it. Mostly it's a good kind of chaos, but it's chaos nonetheless.
We have had to postpone a few trips due to the space we had allocated being reclaimed by our partners abroad, and our Tahiti program scheduled for this November is the latest to suffer this fate. We will thus postpone Tahiti to next November (2023); we are currently just waiting to get the dates and we will then revise the itinerary.
As for things moving in a positive sense, we are nearly finished the itinerary for the first two weeks of our Sicilian LiveAway and will be doing the webinar for that program on May 17 (link below).
At the moment it's just two weeks there that will be happening in conjunction with our Malta LiveAway. We will be doing a second two week segment in Sicily, but I have to come back in June for a bit more reconnaissance to ensure that's set up properly.
We are releasing the first two weeks early because space is really disappearing quickly right now; I had to fend off an American tour operator to secure the aparthotels for this first Sicily segment...and I was successful 😉
This simply is the reality of the world of travel at the moment - lots of ups and downs, changes, and negotiations. We have to move quickly to secure things, and then move relatively quickly to get them booked.
As supply remains limited and in high demand, I expect this to remain the norm for the near future at least. All told though I much prefer all this movement to the stagnant gloom of the past several years, and I'm confident we'll get everything put together properly in short order.
I appreciate your indulgence, your patience, and your feedback immensely, and I'm excited to release a whole host of new programs in the weeks ahead. More adventures are on the way 🙂
Cheers!
P.S. It came to my attention recently that the link to our Facebook group was broken in our welcome emails...my apologies if you tried to join and it didn't work. Here's a link that does!
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