rocky mountaineer

Jillian Harris, Former Bachelorette Star Turns Railway Car Designer

Filed under: Celebrity Design, Architecture & Design

Reality television star Jillian Harris rode on the Rocky Mountaineer railway during her turn as The Bachelorette, now she she's designing for the brand. Harris, who owns Jillian Harris Design and now appears on Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, will redesign Rocky Mountaineer's bi-level glass-domed GoldLeaf coach.

"We're very excited to have Jillian partner with us on this project," says Hubert Wat, Vice President, Global Marketing. "Her extensive design background along with her passion and intimate knowledge of our product and brand make her the ideal designer for this project."

Her finished design will combine modern style with a nod to the luxurious earlier days of railway travel. The project will include a new design concept for the GoldLeaf coach's lower level dining area and upper level seating area.The first coach will be launched during the 2011 season and other cars will be redesigned with the new concept in multiple stages, resulting in a total of 16 GoldLeaf coaches redesigned. Harris says, "You can guarantee I'll be one of the first to take the trip in the newly renovated car - it's going to be stunning!"

Rocky Mountaineer offers 45 Canadian vacation packages and four distinctive rail routes trekking through the natural beauty of British Columbia and Alberta. In 2010, Rocky Mountaineer received its fifth World Travel Award for "World's Leading Travel Experience by Train" and was acknowledged for the first time for "World's Leading Luxury Travel Product of the Year".

Tags: jillian harris, rocky mountaineer, train travel

Tell Us Everything, Travel Entrepreneur Katrina A. Garnett

by Carrie N. Culpepper (RSS feed) —

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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