Episode 61: Fostering Luxurious Experiences With A Local Touch w/ Kate Moore

My guest on today’s podcast is Kate Moore. Kate is the founder of Melted and Moved, a boutique, luxury travel advisor business that provides travelers with tailor-made travel itineraries that deliver both luxury and a local touch world-wide. In this episode Kate shares her entrepreneurial journey. She shares how building a staffing agency from the ground up gave her 10 years of business experience in a 4 year period, and how when they rolled the staffing agency up under a larger conglomerate, she realized that she doesn’t make for a good employee and needed to be her own boss. From there she decided to merge entrepreneurship with her passion for traveling and hospitality and launched Melted and Moved…. In January 2020. Kate shares how starting a travel advisory business during COVID was both incredibly hard and trial by fire that build knowledge, experience, and relationships that have allowed her to deliver even more value to her clients. In this episode we dive into what it means to deliver value in hard times for your clients, keys to balancing working in your business versus on your business, and the importance of being passionate about what you do, because that will get you through the days when work feels hard. Melted And Moved is the real deal for anyone looking to level up their travel experience and if you are interested, their links are in the show notes. So with that introduction, I hope you enjoy this episode of the Self-Employment Success Podcast, with Kate Moore.

Links:

Meltedandmoved.com

Instagram Meltedandmoved

Linkedin Meltedandmoved

Transcript:

All right, welcome Kate Moore to the Self -Employment Success podcast. Thanks for being here. Thank you for having me. Of course. To get started, let the listeners know who is Kate Moore, who are you, and what do you do? Yeah, absolutely. So I run a boutique travel agency in Norfolk, Virginia. We lived in Richmond for a while. The nice thing about my business is our clients are all over, so it's a fun way to kind of work from people.

in all different backgrounds and places, but we love being based here and it's been a great journey so far. Okay, so tell us what Boutique Travel Advisor is. Yeah, absolutely. So we consider ourselves Luxury Travel Advisors for our niche. We curate custom itineraries and our goal is to celebrate each destination with luxury and a local touch. So that's sort of

the client side of things. What that really means is we have partners that are in destination. So every time we're planning a trip, we're contacting people on the ground to work with to plan those custom itineraries for you. So when we say local touch, we mean based on their local knowledge, their know how of the destination and making sure those logistics are going off as seamless as possible. So for example, if I'm like, I want to go to Italy. Yeah.

Italy's a big place. You would kind of get to know us, what we care about, and then be like, actually think the Amalfi Coast would be great, but there are certain places that are really touristy. Our local knowledge of the place says there's this really great boutique hotel, these places to eat and these excursions where you're not going to get bombarded with, you know, the regular touristy stuff. Like you're going to get your curated experience based on you and it's going to be luxurious as well as on the more like

local authentic side, is that right? Yeah, absolutely. And I think kind of like similar from your perspective in business, like you've seen a shift from travel agents to advisors the same way, like you have a financial advisor. We're trying to move away from the agent concept of feeling a little bit more transactional in nature and more relationship focused. So the concept of an advisor is truly

we're focused on the relationship there. So your trip to Italy might be our first call, that might be our first time working together, but the goal with that is to build the trust and understanding of who you are. So when we're bringing that to our clients, if you said, hey, we want to do Sienna and all these cool regions in Tuscany, but we want to do a wine tasting, and we'll be like, okay, well, there's so many different wine tastings we could do, but based off of what you told us about yourself, do you want to be...

harvesting, do you want to go for the harvest experience and physically pulling the grapes in the process? Do you want to do vertical tasting where you're really kind of tasting one vintage each year that it was aged? So everybody's going to view that differently. And us being able to curate that for you, Custom takes time. And our partners on the ground have a lot of access to different farms and vineyards that you won't find on Google. So that's what makes it unique.