Traveling with the wrong people can completely ruin an experience. Traveling with the right group of people can make your experience will SO much richer! That’s why we love sharing the World Vegan Travel story…because we love to find just the right mix of people for every single trip (and plus, it’s a really cool story)!
How we met
We met while traveling and working in 2005. We were both leading tours for an Australian adventure travel company and ended up on a shared trip to Morocco. Brighde had already been working for this company for a few years, leading tours in South-East Asia and France when the opportunity to run the first tours in Morocco came up and Brighde jumped at the chance. And Seb was the new trainee tour leader on that trip! It wasn’t long after we met that we fell in love and decided to settle down.
Starting our adventure
We packed up and moved to Vietnam where Seb’s parents were working for the Canadian embassy at the time. Brighde opened a local travel company and Seb began developing a film and TV-production services business.
Going vegan
Four years later Brighde decided to switch gears professionally and finally put her teaching degree to use so we moved to Bangkok, Thailand, and entered the international school circuit. At this time we also became vegan! We moved back and forth between Jakarta, Indonesia, and then back to Bangkok, where Brighde accepted a position with a top international school in Asia.
Luxury travel
Meanwhile, Seb had started a new hobby called “travel hacking,” which means collecting frequent flyer miles and hotel loyalty points and trading them for business/first-class flights and 4-5 star hotel stays, all for a similar cost to economy travel. Consequently, we developed a taste for luxury travel! But while it was nice to stay in the most comfortable beds in amazing locations, we felt frustrated with the reality of vegan options in fancier places. It quickly became apparent that we were missing out on local food tasting experiences, and it was annoying and disheartening to constantly be pushed toward non-vegan-friendly day trips like dairy farms or zoo visits.
Our first EVER trip!
Around this same time, we became friends with Colleen Patrick-Goudreau and her husband David. We traveled extensively with them over this period, and on one of our trips, possibly over a bottle of wine or two, we came up with a crazy idea…
What if we were to create a super-fancy trip to our ‘hood’, Thailand, pulling out all the stops, to show vegans how vegan travel could be done? With all our travel, tour, business and production experience we knew we could come up with an itinerary chock full of unique adventures and, of course, all the amazing vegan food you could ask for!
Colleen generously lent us her brand and helped to get the word out to her followers. Before we knew it we were off on our first-ever CPG Vegan Thailand trip, meeting and traveling with incredible people, and having an amazing time in Thailand!
The feedback from that initial trip was phenomenal! Testimonials ranged from “the best trip ever” to “a life-changing experience!” It was the beginning of something beautiful that has been expanding since that day!
Contact us to find out how YOU can become part of an upcoming World Vegan Travel adventure.
