From travelweekly.com
When Rebecca Gade-Sawicki quit her job in fundraising at the start of the pandemic, she wanted her next career move to closely align with her passion for veganism.
While she initially sought a job with a vegan or environmental company, Covid hiring challenges forced Gade-Sawicki to re-evaluate: Instead, she reflected on travels with her husband, who also follows a plant-based diet. And she thought about the questions she fielded from family and friends when she went abroad, including inquiries on what she ate, whether she had to bring food in her luggage and whether she lost weight during travel.
"The questions were quite funny, so I thought, why don't I start a blog?" she recalled. "This is going to open me up to new opportunities and networking with like-minded people."
That blog, Veggies Abroad, has since amassed a following of vegan travellers. It offers destination guides, restaurant recommendations, hotel suggestions and travel advice to about 30,000 visitors to the site per month. In 2023, it expanded into a full-fledged travel agency, also called Veggies Abroad, that offers custom FIT travel services and small-group tours -- with plant-based cuisine and sustainable travel at the core of its offerings.
A 10-day tour to Greece next April, for example, will include stays in Athens, Kalampaka, Delphi, Central Arcadia, Mycenae and Spetses Island. Clients will visit an agro-farm, take part in an olive oil tasting and participate in a vegan cooking class. All meals included with the tour -- nine breakfasts, four lunches and six dinners -- will be plant-based.
Veggie specialization
Gade-Sawicki joins the growing ranks of travel advisors who are choosing to specialize and customize their offerings to a particular demographic. While there's no single reliable count of how many vegans exist worldwide, the market they're driving is easier to measure: According to DataHorizzon Research, the global vegan food market was valued at $27.2 billion in 2022 and is projected to reach $63.5 billion by 2032 as consumers turn to plant-based diets for ethical, health and environmental reasons.
This year, Gade-Sawicki is seeing tremendous interest in her tours. The agency has grown 40% over last year, and she estimates she'll hit $500,000 in sales by year's end. The Veggies Abroad blog remains one of her biggest drivers of client leads; referrals and prospective clients also find her through a Google search.
Although her agency's trips are open to nonvegan clients, prospective Veggies Abroad customers should be aware that meals will be preset as plant-based, as Gade-Sawicki does her own restaurant research, prioritizes vegan and vegetarian restaurants and negotiates menus with partner hotels in advance.
"In my previous career, I had to say yes to a lot of things that I didn't agree with," Gade-Sawicki said. "I didn't want to end up within the travel space selling things I didn't believe in."
She recalled meeting another advisor who told her: "Hey, here's the one good thing about the travel industry: the buck stops with you. If you want to support certain organizations, you can. If you don't want to support others, you don't have to.'"
Gade-Sawicki also often leads the tours herself, arriving at the destination ahead of time to nail down final details with the hotel staff and chef. If the experience with a supplier is a positive one, she's more likely to return (Playa Viva and Palmaia -- The House of AiA, both in Mexico, received high marks from her).
But when catering to specific diets, challenges can arise: "Hotel communication is one of my biggest headaches," she said. "The salesperson can say one thing [to someone else]… and it's always an awful, awful game of telephone.
When you can develop a personal relationship [with a supplier], then people feel more beholden to making sure that they don't screw up."
Vetting who's for real
Gade-Sawicki's portfolio of tours includes itineraries in destinations across the globe. She prefers to work with B Corp-certified organizations, meaning that the supplier is held to standards for social and environmental performance, transparency and accountability. She aims to be equally transparent in her own business; she releases an Impact Report each year, and last year, more than 50% of the suppliers Veggies Abroad worked with were B Corp certified.
When vetting suppliers, Gade-Sawicki said it's her goal to continue to grow her roster of suppliers that have their own sustainability initiatives, operate with fair labour and purchasing practices and put a premium on community involvement.
"You can tell who is genuine about it and who is just checking a box," she said, adding that she organizes Zoom calls with partners and digs deeper into sustainability practices, charitable endeavours and the like.
" You can determine if someone is greenwashing and someone's not," she said. "Companies that are really interested, and really care, are going to be really excited to tell you about that."
Intrepid Travel, a certified B Corp organization, is a go-to partner for many Veggies Abroad tours, as is Rebecca Adventure Travel, a destination marketing company based in Ecuador, for Central and South American tours.
Although she hasn't entered the cruise space, Gade-Sawicki said she is considering expedition lines such as UnCruise Adventures and National Geographic-Lindblad Expeditions.
Nearly all of this year's Veggies Abroad tours are sold out, but Gade-Sawicki has her eye on the future, with eight to 10 tours scheduled for 2027.
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