Everyone has a favorite travel destination. That question raised Tom Filippini’s curiosity.
"The No. 1 question I was asked was, ‘Tom, what’s the next great place?’" said Filippini, a travel industry veteran. "I constantly told people, ‘It’s not necessarily a place, it’s an experience, an environment that’s created for you,’" he told Reuters.
Those queries led Filippini to develop his Denver, Colorado-based luxury travel service Next Great Place, which allowing clients to customize their own getaways at a variety of upscale resorts.
Users are able to tailor their vacations right down to requests for suites with granite countertops in the kitchen, personal ski instructors for the kids or a week’s worth of four-star restaurant reservations.
“Filippini is betting customers can book better high-end family vacations with his new web site than by wading through an overload of online information on unfamiliar destinations or using travel agents,” Reuters says.
"The Internet is really only good for booking the hotel rooms and the airlines," said Filippini.
He said users create a "vacation request" that includes what they want to do, where they want to go, the dates they wish to travel and how many people are going.
Unlike travel agents, Next Great Place doesn’t operate on commission and it doesn’t charge vendors a listing fee. Instead, members pay a yearly subscription fee.
By David Wilkening
