concierge service

Tell Us Everything, Travel Entrepreneur Katrina A. Garnett

Filed under: Luxury Travel & Hotels, Tell Us Everything

Silicon Valley entrepreneur and investor Katrina Garnett recently launched My Little Swans, a luxury family travel web site for adventurous families looking for one-of-a-kind adventures that involve things like lunch at a Bedoin camp in Jordan and sailing Alaska's Inside Passage on a private yacht. Unlike her previous, very-techie businesses, this one was born out of Garnett's hobby: She's originally from Australia and she and her husband regularly take their three children on ambitious trips across the globe.

Garnett's not intimidated by traveling with kids, instead she's passionate about the advantages of exposing children to world cultures. MyLittleSwans.com aims to cut out the travel agent by featuring itineraries from her many trips with restaurant, hotel, shopping and other suggestions of places she and her concierge partners have personally vetted. Plus, the site's selected list of tour operators in each of those destinations can arrange for custom adventures from a backstage tour of a Chinese opera to a hiking trip with the Maasai tribe in Tanzania.

Garnett – and by extension her site – is like that in-the-know friend always up on the newest, hottest and best. But she also shares the little-known, like her personal watchmaker in Switzerland and jeweler in Paris. She spent two years and more than $2 million of her own money developing the site and made sure it included a social media aspect, which she believes is essential for web 2.0 success. We chatted with this firecracker over drinks at New York's Gramercy Tavern and asked her to Tell Us Everything.

Why did you decide to go into travel?
I've been planning world adventures for my family for 15 years, from the time my firstborn was less than a year old. Over the years, numerous friends and acquaintances have sought me out for travel advice, so I've shared my itineraries and photos with them, and they've taken the same or similar trips and loved them.

But as the number of requests grew – and the Web became increasingly difficult to navigate from a discerning point of view – I saw there was need for a comprehensive trustworthy online resource that makes it easy for families to plan extraordinary journeys and to go straight to the source for the best guides and insider experiences.

My Little Swans is not just a bunch of pretty pictures and opinions. There are, of course, countless travel websites and online sources, but I think few that are developed with an eye to the future and a deep understanding of the tech underbelly; I'm a total tech nerd. And as most of my friends know, I'm also a bit of a perfectionist and can be a nut when it comes to research, so the MLS content reflects this 150 percent and always will – nothing is "pay for play" or ad-driven.

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Visa Black Card Introduces New Benefits

by Michael B. Dougherty (RSS feed) —

Filed under: Services

Visa has unveiled an array of new features to its ultra-exclusive Black Card's concierge program.

Available to just 1% of US residents-to ensure a maximum level of service for members-the sleek carbon card, with an undisclosed credit line, now comes with added amenities to its full-service concierge plan. With either a phone call or an email, the Black Card team is available 24/7 to handle anything from the standard restaurant, flight or hotel reservation to more challenging requests, like emergency document translation or specialty shopping, for when your beach reading requires a first edition. Now the card goes one step further when it comes to travel, offering trip delay reimbursements, roadside assistance (US & Canada), emergency services and increased redemption value for travel points.

Perhaps the most useful, and enjoyable, service though remains the Black Card's lifestyle management. Whether staying local or traveling to the most far-flung locale, the concierge will curate an evening out, including transportation, entertainment and dining. After tailoring your activities to your request, an email confirmation will arrive with an itemized itinerary. When the night is at hand, you'll receive a call from a Black Card representative to confirm that everything is in order, before you even get your bow tie on. Stepping out, your evening's chariot could be a Mercedes-Benz S550, whose driver will escort you to your entertainment, say, Cirque du Soleil's new Ovo performance (with VIP access). After two hours of wondering how the human body can leap, bend and balance like that, you'll have worked up quite the appetite, so it's off to dinner at the newly opened hot-spot with an impenetrable reservation line (if you're in Manhattan, have them gain you entrée to Keith McNally's Pulino's). As the night wanes, your driver suddenly becomes your best friend for returning you to your hotel or residence, as anyone with heels on will attest to.

Factor in travel priority, luxury gifts, and auto/baggage/travel insurance, and suddenly your gold and platinum cards may seem to be worth not much more than, well, plastic.

Tags: black card, concierge service, ConciergeService, credit cards, CreditCards, luxury credit cards, visa, visa black card