Jean Pickard

I come from a family of wanderers. As a kid growing up in Florida, we spent a lot of time exploring the state from top to bottom. It was never the cities but always the state parks, the secluded beaches, the dirt roads that went who knows where. And thus began my lifelong wanderlust.

Not even a year out of college, I found myself working for a large local travel agency in Atlanta in their leisure department and I have never looked back. In 1988, it was time for a change so, with a business partner, I opened Explorations, a Travel Agency Ltd. By that time, I had honed my wanderlust to a love of third world destinations, exotic and off-the-beaten path places, which became the focus of our agency. We were at the very beginning of “adventure travel” when there was nothing at all luxurious about it. But it was awesome! I ventured to the most faraway places I could find - Mongolia, Papua New Guinea, Mali, Kamchatka, Yemen, Bhutan, Malawi, Namibia, Madagascar, Malaysia - places to where, at the time, very few tourists had traveled.

When we joined Virtuoso in 2000, our client mix changed and we started focusing more on luxury travel and less on the adventure side. Since then, like my clients, I am looking for more “creature comforts” but I continue to be true to my first love and search out those destinations that are as far away from the crowds as possible.

By 2014, my husband and I were spending 5 months of the summer in Vancouver and it was time to let go. It was difficult to say good bye after 25 years but it was the right thing to do at the right time and we sold Explorations to SmartFlyer based in New York. I am proud to be affiliated with SmartFlyer as an independent contractor.