Melissa DaSilva Makes Magic: Three Decades of Dedication to Making Dreams Come True in the Travel Industry
Thank you to Melissa DaSilva, president of The Travel Corporation Travel Brands, for joining me on my podcast to talk about travel. She focuses on Making Travel Matter. We have met at many travel conferences around the world from the 10th annual Women’s Travel Fest in New York City to Travel Classics International at Ashford Castle in Ireland. For the last thirty years, she has been helping people realize their dreams and helping local communities.
I know from my travels that when we meet people in other places we realize we are all more alike than different, now more than ever, we need to remember that all over our planet, parents want their children to grow up happy, heathy and in safe peaceful countries.
Listen or watch our interview on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube or your favorite podcast platform
READ THE TRANSCRIPT BELOW
Lisa Niver:
Good morning. This is Lisa Niver. I’m the founder of We Said Go Travel and the author of Brave-ish, One Breakup, Six Continents and Feeling Fearless After 50. I did 50 Travel Challenges and some of them were with the incredible brands that Melissa DaSilva makes happen.at The Travel Corporation. I’m so excited to have you here today.
Melissa DaSilva:
I am so happy to be here. Thank you for having me.
Lisa Niver:
It is my great honor. I felt so happy to hear you speak at the Women’s Travel Fest on the panel about women traveling over 50. And then we were so lucky to be together in Ireland at the amazing Red Carnation Property, there’s no other hotel like Ashford Castle.
Melissa DaSilva:
I agree. It is one of my favorite places on earth. And speaking of being 50, that’s where I celebrated my 50th birthday. So my two best friends and I, we decided to take a lifelong trip to Ireland and we ended it with three nights at Ashford Castle. And I have to say that being treated like a queen on your 50th birthday is the way to go.
Ashford Castle Photo by Lisa Niver at Travel Classics Ireland, the property is part of TTC Red Carnation Hotels
Lisa Niver:
Oh my goodness. I mean, I can’t say enough about Ashford Castle. You and I were both there as part of Travel Classics Ireland the most recent time, and I’ve been there twice. And for me, walking with the Hawk, the falconry that’s in my book, because that is one of the most amazing experiences of my life.
Melissa DaSilva:
I agree. It’s one of my favorite things to do when I am at Ashford as well. I just think there’s something so wild and powerful about it. And yet, just Majestic and I’m not a huge bird fan, but there’s something about the birds of prey and the hawks that they really take your breath away. They really do.
Lisa Niver:
That’s one of the things that all of your travel brands have in common is searching for those key experiences. You don’t want go to some place that looks the same as when you’re at home and do something you could do around the corner. You’ve flown on this flight and you’ve made this effort. When I was on Insight Vacations Luxury Gold on the Motor Coach, that we had some incredible experiences. We were at dinner in Rome and all of a sudden we were having a private concert.
Melissa DaSilva:
The thing that I love best about a guided vacation, and for any of your listeners who don’t know about the brands that I represent, I actually represent six fabulous tour brands and we really have something for everyone. And it’s, everything from ConTiki, which is our youth brand, all the way up to, as you mentioned, Luxury Gold, which is our high-end luxury brand for the more discerning traveler. We really do have something for everyone. But the thing that they have in common is that we are able to connect our guests with people and experiences that they wouldn’t necessarily even know about, let alone be able to book on their own. And so it makes it really special to be able to deliver that and to watch people have these really transformational experiences that is what makes travel to me so special is to your point, it’s being able to really connect with the destination and the culture in a way that’s deeper than just ticking something off your bucket list.
Lisa Niver:
When I was in Ireland the very first time I was in Dublin at St. Patrick’s Day with Brendan Vacations, I went to see Newgrange, which is a thousand years older than the pyramids.
Melissa DaSilva:
Tthe world is so huge and you and I, we travel avidly all the time and our list just gets longer and longer and longer. It’s not like we ever make a dent in it because we hear about all of these phenomenal places and experiences and add new ones. And that’s why we have six brands and we travel to all seven continents because literally you’ll never get to the end of your list. Brendan Vacations is super special, has a very special place in my heart. We’re able to create custom vacations for whatever the traveler really wants, which is what makes it really special because it’s tailored to whoever it is that’s planning the trip. So, whether you are like me and you’re 50 and you’re planning a big celebration or maybe you want to do a family reunion or you want to trace your heritage, that’s what makes it really special for us is to be able to do that for people.
Lisa Niver:
So obviously you have a wealth of experience and these incredible brands, but what brought you to travel? Were you an early traveler? Did you go on vacation with your family? Did you choose study abroad or summer camp? What inspired you to just have wanderlust in your blood?
Melissa DaSilva:
That’s a great question. So I actually didn’t travel internationally at all when I was younger, but my mother had been one of those women who after college she went and lived in Europe for like three months. In the sixties, she was a very early adopter of women’s solo travel. I heard her stories my entire childhood growing up. And I wanted to do that. I wanted to go experience the world. I also grew up in a very, very small town. I’m from northern California, right by Lake Tahoe, this tiny little ski town called Truckee. And for me, the world just seemed like this big, big, big place that I wanted to explore but didn’t know how. My goal in life was to get a job where I would get paid to travel. I didn’t have a lot of money and going on vacation; it seemed out of reach for me.
I wanted to get a job where I could get paid to travel. I went to school in media and journalism and I thought that’s what I’ll do. It’s the only job that I knew of where I could be someplace else and still be working. When I was at UCLA, I had friends that were traveling all the time and I said, how are you doing this? And they said, we work at the travel travel agency on campus. And so I thought, I need to do that. So that’s where I got a job. That’s what helped pay my way through school. And I remember I had an internship my last year of school with MGM studios in the PR media department and I hated it.
So I quit and picked up more hours at the travel agency andthe rest is history. I was at a travel agency for almost 20 years between that job and another one. And then I’ve been here for going on 11. I’ve been over 30 years in the travel industry. When you work in this industry and you get to experience all the amazing things that travel provides, it opens your eyes, it brings cultures closer together. It really does show us how the world is very, very small and how really we are more alike than we are different. That’s incredibly special and it’s really hard to even think about a job that would do anything different. I feel very, very fortunate and grateful that this is the job that I ended up with and it makes me extremely happy to come to work every day, being able to bring people’s travel dreams to life.
Lisa Niver:
That is true. You are a giver of dreams.
Melissa DaSilva:
I am <laugh>.
Lisa Niver:
That’s amazing. I had an early job in travel after I learned to scuba dive and I was teaching and I could not afford exotic scuba vacations and I went to work for Club Med. And after that I worked on cruise ships. But I always thought about being a tour guide and I have to say the tour guides I’ve met on your different brands have all been incredible people. How do you discover these people that are part of your guided tours that bring the whole experience to life?
Melissa DaSilva:
I think what’s really interesting is if you talk to anybody who’s traveled on any of our trips, they will tell you that their travel director was the best travel director on the face of the Earth <laugh>. And they will battle it out. And I think that’s amazing ’cause it means that really every one of our travel directors is doing a phenomenal job. There’s a couple of things that we look for. Obviously they need to know about the destination. They have to be extremely, not just well-versed, but they need to really know if not live in that destination. But the thing that’s more important to us, I think than that is that they’re actually fun people that you would want to travel with. Nobody wants to travel with their old high school history teacher, right? You want to travel with somebody who’s engaging and exciting and also inspired by the destination that they’re in and who at the end of the day you want to hang out at the bar and have a drink and hear about their experiences.
Melissa DaSilva:
That is critical and important when it comes to us identifying who’s going to be a good travel director. And then of course we continually invest in their ongoing training. More importantly things that are changing in terms of the service delivery and the expectations that our guests have. We’re constantly putting them in the seat of the guest, we call it our personal development training. Once a year we run these trips and severy other year the travel directors are on them where they sit as the guest and then learn from and critique their peers and receive feedback themselves. They’re not just the person sitting at the front of the, the coach, they’re sitting where their guests sit so that they can get a really good perspective of how they can do better and deliver a better experience for our guests.
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— Contiki (@ContikiUSA) September 13, 2019
Lisa Niver:
Many people ask me, how can I travel like you? And when I talk about some of the projects that you have, I get a lot of pushback from people. They say: I do not want to be on a bus with 40 people and I don’t want to wake up every morning early. I know having been on Insight Luxury Gold that every day was really fantastic and seamless. What response do you give to people with all these different brands that have so many levels and so many experiences, especially, for women over 50 who might not want to travel alone, but they don’t want to have too many rules.
Melissa DaSilva:
Now, more than ever, women like myself over 50 who are looking to travel, we’re very, very deliberate and specific about where we want togo, the new places we want tovisit. We want to go on the less traveled destinations. Going with a guided brand is really advantageous for that. It, it delivers that security in the framework, but it also doesn’t restrict you. So to your point, there is a ton of free time built in. You can use that to do your own thing, to go off to be spontaneous or you can use it to hang out with newfound friends. I do think that those of us that travel solo, we do like the mix. We want time to self-reflect. We want time to, experience things on our own. But I do think travel is also really special when it’s a shared experience.
Melissa DaSilva:
And so even if it means coming together at the end of the evening and sharing a meal and a glass of wine and saying, what did you do today and what did you learn and how was your experience same or different than the one that I had? And how special is that? I think that that’s really important. I do think that tours sometimes get a bad rap. There is a misconception as you say, based on how things were 40 years ago. And when I tell you that we are evolving on a yearly, weekly, monthly basis, we get constant feedback from our guests. Every single guest provides us feedback and we are constantly acting on it. So when I say to you we have six brands with a travel style for everyone, I mean that if they want to travel, we can find a trip that has a slower pace, slower starts or a faster pace. If they want to tick everything off because they know that this is the only two week vacation they get. We can go in depth in one destination. We could spend all seven days in one city or we could hit five countries in 10 days. It’s really up to the guest and what they want to do. And I think that that’s really important to know is that it is not a one size fits all to your point. We can really find the perfect trip depending on what it is that that guest is looking for.
Lisa Niver:
And so as an example, I saw one of my cousins last night and she’s getting divorced, she’s over 50, she doesn’t want to travel alone. She really wants what you’re saying, to look around on her own, but have people to have dinner with at night. Are there trips that are more focused to women over 50 or people that want transformation? Or how does that work?
Melissa DaSilva:
All of our trips are open to anyone. In that sense I would say you will find 15% of the travelers on any of our trips are traveling on their own. But we do have trips with our brand Insight in particular where they can choose to travel on a trip with only women, with a female travel director, with even the drivers are women. The other thing that’s really special about those trips is that the experiences that we’re picking are highlighting women owned or women run businesses. Everything that we do is going to be giving back as much as possible to the local economy. But those trips specifically, we want to make sure that we empower those women-owned businesses. That’s really special because as a traveler, not only are you getting that experience, but you’re also able to give back a little bit.
Lisa Niver:
Well, I remember on my trip when we were in Italy, we were doing some of the things with Treadright, your philanthropy arm.
Melissa DaSilva:
We’ve evolved that a little bit. Treadright is our nonprofit organization that oversees all of our sustainability efforts. And within each of our brands we are committed to make travel matter. And what I mean by that is we have identified 571 projects now. Our new report just came about our make travel matter experiences. And no matter what trip you go on, on any of our brands, we’re always going to have at least one, if not more than one. And what that means is we have built them into the itinerary. So people who are traveling with us, regardless of where they’re going they are going to be giving back to the communities that they travel to. And that could be something that gives back to either the planet or the people.
Melissa DaSilva:
The majority of our experiences are actually giving back to the communities that we visit or the wildlife. So particularly let’s say you’re traveling to Africa or maybe the Galapagos, we’re going to make sure that we’ve got some some conservation efforts going on, but it’s not like you’re volunteering per se. What we want to do is give back in a meaningful way that is sustainable. A really great example that I would love to share is we work with a woman named Marta in Tuscany and Marta is a weaver. She weaves on a 900 year old loom back from the Renaissance Times. And she is, we believe the last woman who actually was weaving on this type of loom, she learned it from her grandmother who learned it from her grandmother who learned it from her grandmother. And she’s an artist. I mean she will tell you straight up that that’s what she is.
Melissa DaSilva:
She is an artist, but she was not able to sustain her business and she was weeks away from having to close her studio when she was connected with the Treadright Foundation and we were able to collaborate with her. And now two of our brands, both Insight Vacations and Trafalgar have trips that go in, they visit her studio. Our guests get to watch her weave on a 900 year old loom. I get goosebumps, right? They get to hear about her stories from her grandmother and she’s been able to build a business that now is gonna be sustainable. She’s able to have a apprentice, now. So her niece is her apprentice. So this craft, this artisanship is not going to die after 900 years because we were able to form a really beautiful symbiotic relationship with her. Our guests get an amazing experience and Marta, this wonderful woman that we work with in Perugia, she gets to keep this beautiful studio in this tradition alive. That’s what I mean when I say that we’ve got these make travel matter experiences. We are making travel matter in a really meaningful way.
“The best restaurant in town, with a sunset view”- Cruise Manager Louisa in Ristorante Rialto onboard #SSLaVenezia#ExploreUniworld pic.twitter.com/ZpT31P3SbP
— Uniworld Cruises (@UniworldCruises) October 6, 2023
Lisa Niver:
And there’s no way you would’ve known this, but I actually was there. I have video from that day and it was so amazing. And I love that of all the places on the planet that you could have picked, you picked one that I actually have been to, which is like a good synergy of how this travel life works, right? <Laugh>. We saw each other in New York at Women’s Travel Fest, We saw each other in Ireland. We both love Ashford Castle. Early on in my writing career and I met Patricia Schultz, I learned about your brand because she was the ambassador for the Trafalgar brand.
One of the things that I’ve been asking all of my guests, because my book is coming out, Brave-ish, One Breakup, Six Continents and Feeling Fearless After Fifty. I did 50 challenges before I turned 50. What are you thinking about maybe personally and professionally, what is something you’re either very proud of a challenge you’ve done or, or what challenge are you looking forward to next?
Melissa DaSilva:
For me personally, I am looking to do some more adventurous travel. My oldest daughter is off to college in the fall. I’ve got one more at home. We’ve been doing family vacations for the past 18 years, which is fun and I love it. But I’m ready to get back to some destinations that the kids aren’t as excited about. So <laugh> I definitely want to do some more hiking and camping and I really want to do Machu Picchu and hike the Inca Trail. I am desperate to get to Egypt, so I can’t believe I haven’t been yet. Those are some places that I’m looking to get to. And those are absolutely places that I would not travel by myself and on my own. I would definitely want to go with a tour.
Melissa DaSilva:
From a work perspective, we are continuing this focus on sustainability. While we’ve done, I think a phenomenal job of embedding all of these fantastic experiences for our guests, the other thing that we’re doing, which is a little bit less visible is on the back end, is all of the work that we’re doing on our road to net zero. We’ve committed that by 2050, we will be completely net zero. When we originally launched our plan in 2020, we were looking for carbon neutrality. And as we all know, that’s just not good enough anymore. Every year using our science-based targets, we are making roads and inroads to being completely net zero. That is a super important initiative for us that we’ll continue to work on. That again, doesn’t get any visibility, but will make us very proud at the end of the day when it is done. Because it’s critical for all of us that work here, that we are leaving the world in a better place than we found it for generations of people to be able to travel. We feel like we’re stewards. We want to make sure that we’re doing good.
Lisa Niver:
I think you’re definitely doing great, and I know you’re just back from an adventure. I appreciate that you made time to talk with me. I think it’s very inspiring for people to see the the way that you shifted in your early career. You thought you were going to do one thing, and then you worked in the travel agency. You were inspired to travel like your mom and, and you’re making that happen. That’s so inspiring.
Melissa DaSilva:
Thank you so much. Travel is in my soul. I knew I always wanted to do it and I feel very, very again fortunate that I get to do this every single day. I’m excited to come to work every day and, even after everything that the travel industry went through in the past three years, just being able to be part of the recovery– that’s also very, very special. And, being surrounded by an entire team of people globally who are so committed to making sure that our guests have amazing vacations is it’s very, very special.
Lisa Niver:
I agree with you. I worked on the cruise ships for a long time and at September 11th everything shifted so considerably. And then these past few years, like you’re mentioning with the covid coaster, it’s been again so challenging. In the United States where we both are filming today, there was a lot of economic support and other countries don’t necessarily have that. Specifically, some of the places I visit, like in the Pacific Islands, it was desperate times for people. Tourism is a huge part of the economy.
Melissa DaSilva:
It’s huge. And I don’t think people really think about all of the different parts of the tourism economies. It’s not just the airplanes and the tours and the hotels. It’s all of those small businesses that support them, whether it be walking tours or even restaurants or the people that are doing laundry. There is such a huge portion of the world economy that is focused and reliant on tourism. It’s estimated to be one in 10 jobs are impacted by tourism in the world. And so if you think about that, that is massive 10% of the entire world. And so you’re right, there was not that kind of support everywhere and even where there was support, it’s still been incredibly difficult for the industry to return back to normal. And so being part of that, I think has been not only a challenge, but also extremely rewarding.
Lisa Niver:
We’re fortunate to have passports where we can acquire visas relatively easy and have access to transportation. Also, I, like you, feel very fortunate to have been able to go different places and I love that there’s such a big focus at the Travel Corporation with making travel matter and like you said, the amazing weaver. I look forward to doing more travel with your brands. I was so honored and I had such a good time at Ashford Castle. I definitely want to stay at more Red Carnation properties!
Melissa DaSilva:
They are magical.
Lisa Niver:
Travel is magic and you, Melissa, are magic. I really appreciate you making the time to come talk to me and my listeners about the incredible travel opportunities across all of your amazing brands.
Melissa DaSilva:
Thank you so much. It was a pleasure to be here.
In our interview we talked about Brendan Vacations Newgrange tour that I took in 2015
I traveled with Insight Vacations Luxury Gold in Italy. Melissa talked about Marta Cucchi the weaver in Umbria that Treadrite supports–this video is about my visit during our trip:
My Insight Vacation: Read Part 1 Part 2 Part 3
and watch through 31 videos of my trip:
Together in Ireland
Melissa DaSilva is President of the TTC Tour Brands for North America with an industry career spanning 30 years. Travel is both a personal passion and professional pursuit. An avid and lifelong traveler Melissa has been to more than fifty countries and has lived in both the US and the UK. She has been recognized for an ability to rapidly adjust in a changing business environment, resulting in enhanced business practices, increased productivity, and profits. She has a proven success record of recruiting and developing strong, collaborative teams and delivering consistency in multi-channel organizations.
Her contagious enthusiasm comes from a deeply held belief she shares with The Travel Corporation; travel helps broaden perspectives through the connectivity of shared experiences of adventure, exploration, learning and laughter showing how we are all more alike than different.
Find your next holiday and MAKE TRAVEL MATTER!
LISTEN on APPLE PODCAST: MAKE YOUR OWN MAP
Lisa’s book: Brave-ish, One Breakup, Six Continents and Feeling Fearless After Fifty
More about Lisa’s memoir: BRAVE-ish
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