Last week, Susan and I packed our bags for Las Vegas for the most intense, exciting, exhausting, and inspiring event on our calendar every year: Virtuoso Travel Week.
For months leading up to Travel Week, we prepare. We research companies, study destinations and properties, reach out to the people we know we’ll be meeting, and start thinking about the questions we want to ask. By the time we arrive in Las Vegas, our schedules are packed from morning until night.
And when I say packed, I mean packed.
Most days, we left our hotel room around 7:15 in the morning and didn’t return until 10:00 at night or later. There were breakfast and coffee meetings, networking appointments, lunches, more appointments, meetings outside our scheduled sessions, professional development, dinners, happy hours, supplier events, parties, and countless conversations squeezed into every available moment.
But here’s the funny thing.
Even though our clients weren’t actually in Las Vegas with us, we brought you with us everywhere we went.
Eight Minutes. Make Them Count.
One of the biggest parts of Virtuoso Travel Week is something called matched appointments. The easiest way to describe them is professional speed dating.
We sit down with a hotelier, cruise line, destination management company, tour operator, or another travel partner. We have eight minutes together.
Then it’s time to move on to the next one.
Eight minutes!
That’s why our work starts long before we ever arrive in Las Vegas. Before Travel Week, we reach out to the people we’re scheduled to meet, often connecting on LinkedIn and letting them know we’re looking forward to talking with them. Then we research their companies and do our own discovery so we aren’t spending those precious eight minutes asking questions we could have answered ourselves.
We want to ask the questions that matter.
Who is the right client for you? What do you do differently? What should we understand that we won’t learn from your website? Where can you make an itinerary better? And, perhaps most importantly, which of our clients are we already thinking about while we’re sitting across from you?
Because that happens constantly.
Sometimes, a Conversation Immediately Makes Us Think of You
This year, I sat down with a destination management company, or DMC, specializing in Ireland, Scotland, and London.
First, we had to laugh about my name. McKenzie McCarty is apparently a pretty strong way to walk into a meeting with someone selling Scotland.
Then we got down to business.
We’ve been diving deeper into working with DMCs because they can be an incredible connection between us, the hotels we book, and the actual experience our clients have within a destination. Rather than simply overseeing an itinerary from afar, the right DMC can help us build the details on the ground and give our clients access to local expertise, experiences, guides, transportation, and support.
As I listened, my brain immediately went to our clients.
Ireland and Scotland are incredibly popular with our travelers right now. We’ve had so many conversations with clients who want to explore these destinations, and suddenly I wasn’t just learning about another company. I was thinking about real trips we could create and real people we could potentially match with this partner.
That’s what so much of Travel Week looks like for us.
We aren’t walking around collecting companies to add to a list.
We’re constantly thinking, “Who would love this?”
Another meeting this year was with a group tour operator we’d heard wonderful things about but had never personally met or worked with. I walked away from that conversation completely inspired by the possibilities for traveling together as a group.
I’m looking at you, Swifties.
My brain started going a million miles an hour. What could we create? Where could we go? Who could we bring together? What would make the trip feel special?
That’s one of my favorite things about this week. Susan and I each bring something different to Susan’s Travel Services, and I’m definitely the more creative side of the brain. Put me in a room with hundreds of people telling me about what’s possible around the world, and I’m going to start dreaming things up.
And Then There Are the People Who Have Become Friends
Of course, Travel Week isn’t only about meeting someone new.
Some of our favorite moments are seeing the people we’ve known for years.
One of those people is our friend David from The Europe Hotel & Resort in Killarney, Ireland.
Our relationship with David did not begin with a carefully planned networking appointment.
It began with a hangover.
Three years ago, we happened to be sitting near David at breakfast when he mentioned to a friend that he wasn’t feeling particularly wonderful after the previous night’s festivities. I overheard him and did what any good future industry friend apparently does.
I offered him Tylenol.
And somehow, from that completely random breakfast interaction, a friendship was born.
Since then, Susan and my dad, Dan, have visited David at The Europe Hotel & Resort twice, and it has become a property we absolutely love for our clients. Now, when we see David at Travel Week, we’re not introducing ourselves or exchanging business cards. We’re catching up with a friend.
That’s the part of this industry that is difficult to explain until you’ve experienced it.
Some of the most valuable relationships we have didn’t begin because someone sold us something. They grew over breakfasts, dinners, site visits, conversations, shared experiences, and years of getting to know one another.
We also got to spend time with our friend Ray, who represents the Fairmont Kea Lani and Fairmont Orchid in Hawaii. We’ve known Ray for years and through different chapters of his career, and seeing him at Travel Week feels much more like catching up with an old friend than attending a business meeting. We talk about travel, what we’ve experienced recently, what has inspired us, what’s happening at his properties, and, of course, life.
There are so many people like David and Ray at Virtuoso Travel Week that I couldn’t possibly tell all of their stories in one blog post. We’d need an entire series.
But those relationships matter more than our clients may ever realize.
The Things You Can’t Find in a Google Search
There is an unbelievable amount of travel information online.
You can look up hotels. You can compare rooms. You can watch videos of resorts, read reviews, research tour companies, scroll through beautiful photos, and spend hours comparing one itinerary to another.
But information and expertise aren’t the same thing.
One of the biggest things we brought home from Virtuoso Travel Week 2026 was a better understanding of who is right for whom.
We met with DMCs and tour operators we already knew, companies we’d heard of but hadn’t worked with, and others that were completely new to us. Some are enormous names that many travelers would recognize immediately. Others aren’t.
And the biggest name isn’t automatically the best choice.
One company might be phenomenal for one of our clients and completely wrong for another. Two travelers can visit the exact same destination and need entirely different partners behind their trips.
That’s where knowing our clients becomes just as important as knowing our industry.
Part of our job as luxury travel advisors is listening closely enough to understand the things you tell us about yourself, including the details you may not realize will matter later. Then we combine that with decades of experience, firsthand knowledge, and relationships throughout the Virtuoso network to anticipate needs that might not have occurred to you yet.
You shouldn’t have to know every question to ask.
That’s why you have us.
75,000 Steps Each Without Really Going Outside
Of course, all of this relationship building requires a lot of walking.
A lot of walking.
Susan and I each logged more than 75,000 steps throughout the week, running between ARIA, Vdara, Bellagio, and back again.
That’s more than 150,000 steps between the two of us.
And somehow, we barely left the buildings.
Our days became a blur of coffee, conversations, notes, elevators, escalators, appointments, meals, introductions, hugs, and the occasional moment of trying to remember exactly which ballroom we were supposed to be in.
We also found time to film TikToks between meetings, because apparently I don’t believe Susan should be allowed to simply stand around when we have five free minutes.
Every day she’d ask me, “What TikTok are we making today?”
And every day, my answer was essentially, “Let the creative process happen. When I know, I’ll know.”
Eventually inspiration would strike, I’d start directing her, and we’d film whatever ridiculous idea had appeared in my head. It became one of the funniest parts of our week.
By the time we finally made it back to our one-bedroom suite at Vdara each night, we were done.
Completely done.
Susan and I were sharing a king bed for the week, so we’d crawl in, put some true crime show on the laptop, and promptly fall asleep.
Luxury travel, everyone.
Naturally, the Travel Advisors Had Travel Problems
By the final day, we were ready to get home.
Las Vegas to Phoenix is about a 45-minute flight. Easy.
Or so we thought.
Our flight was delayed.
Then delayed again.
And again.
Eventually, the new departure time was so late that we realized we could rent a car, drive all the way back to Phoenix, and be home before our plane even left Las Vegas.
So that’s exactly what we did.
After a week of talking about travel logistics, troubleshooting, planning, transportation, and making sure trips run smoothly, three exhausted travel professionals loaded themselves into a rental car in business attire and started driving across the desert.
And it was hilarious.
We told stories. We laughed about the week. We listened to Taylor Swift. We talked about the people we’d met and the things we’d learned.
And, yes, we made it home before our original flight ever took off.
Our first stop was my house, where I was finally greeted by my Golden Retriever puppy, Piper, which was about the best possible ending I could have asked for after that week.
Then We Came Home and Got to Work
We rested.
And then this morning, Susan and I sat down for something we’re officially bringing back: our Monday Meeting.
Travel Week gave us a lot to talk about.
Who stood out to us? Who do we want to follow up with? Which new relationships do we want to develop? What worked well this year? What didn’t? What did we learn? What marketing ideas did we come home with? What changes do we want to make? What new trips could we create?
Our notes from Travel Week aren’t going into a drawer.
They’re becoming emails we’ll send, relationships we’ll nurture, companies we’ll research further, ideas we’ll develop, and eventually, trips we’ll plan.
That’s the real reason we spend months preparing for this week.
It’s why we happily endure the 75,000 steps, eight-minute appointments, long days, sore feet, packed schedules, and complete exhaustion.
Yes, Susan and I went to Las Vegas for Virtuoso Travel Week.
But we went with you in mind.
Every time we heard about an incredible new experience and thought, “I know who would love that,” you were there.
Every time we asked a question because we knew it would matter to one of our travelers, you were there.
Every new relationship we started and every old friend we hugged might someday become part of someone’s trip.
We didn’t come home from Las Vegas with a list of things we want to sell you.
We came home with people we can call, places we understand better, questions we now know to ask, new ideas we can’t wait to explore, and relationships we trust with the people who trust us.
And ultimately, that’s why we go.
