Luxury Travel Advisor - April 2008 - (Page 50)

COVER STORY Joshua Bush explores thrilling frontiers in space travel and breathes new life into the family business. nyone who knows Joshua Bush knows a whip-smart, held-together guy who’s serious about the travel business. But mention two simple words—Virgin Galactic—and Bush’s face lights up like a kid’s on Christmas morning. It was, appropriately enough, near Christmastime, on December 7, 2006, that Bush learned that his family’s Swarthmore, PA agency, Park Avenue Travel, for which he is the director of business development, had been selected as one of only 42 travel agencies in North America to become an accredited space agency. In other words, that’s the day Bush got the green light from Virgin Galactic to sell travel into outer space. To set the stage, it was during Virtuoso’s 2006 Travel Mart—Park Avenue Travel is a member of the consortium—in Las Vegas that Bush was introduced to Virgin Galactic. “On the first day of the opening ceremonies of Travel Mart, Carolyn Wincer, head of astronaut sales for Virgin Galactic, took to the stage to announce that Virtuoso had been named the exclusive seller for North America for Virgin Galactic,” Bush recalls. “Up on a big screen was this image of Sir Richard [Branson, Virgin’s founder], and he was saying ‘Hello’ and explaining what it was all about. My eyes were just as big as saucers, and I said to myself, ‘This is what we need to do, this is just absolutely fantastic stuff.’ I thought it was the coolest thing.” Upon the conclusion of Wincer’s address, Bush made his way to the stage stairs post haste. “Carolyn had barely made it maybe two steps off the stage and I had already got- Rocket Man ten up and bolted toward her,” Bush says. “I practically tackled her.” What followed was a lengthy and laborious application process. “Virgin Galactic sent out a packet that included two or three pages of questions like, ‘How would you market this?,’ ‘What types of business do you do?’ and ‘Why do you think this is important?’” Bush recalls. “When I finally finished, it had grown to about seven pages.” The process graduated from written applications to live interviews, which Bush says sometimes came in the form of cold calls from Wincer herself in her Seattle office. “Carolyn wanted to see what the response time of the agents was and what clients were to expect if they picked up the phone,” Bush says. “She needed to see what potential galactic customers would go through.” While on a FAM visit to Raffles Canouan Island, an unsuspecting Bush committed to an international conference call, his participation in which, he was told, was required in order to A PARK AVENUE TRAVEL Headquarters: Swarthmore, PA Number of Locations: One President: Craig Bush V.P./Manager: Deborah Bush Director of Business Development: Joshua E. Bush Affiliations: Virtuoso; Virgin Galactic Employees: Eight on-site; nine independent contractors Annual Revenue: $7.5 million Website: www.parkavetravel.com advance in the selection process. Instead, that’s when he learned that his zeal had paid off. “They read this list of names, and then my service dropped out and everything was garbled,” Bush says, laughing. “But I figured it out—it was a long list with some pretty big names on it, and I figured they couldn’t have cut all of those people from the running. It was a really neat experience, to be on that call and to be part of that historic moment.” Soon after receiving the news, Bush was thrust into an in-depth training program that included classes at the Kennedy Space Center and a weightless, parabolic flight aboard Zero-G’s G-Force One (the same method used by NASA in astronaut training) in the skies above Las Vegas. The experience culminated in a two-day space tourism-andtraining forum at the Nastar Center just north of Philadelphia, the Fels Planetarium at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia and at New York City’s Museum of Natural History, where Branson himself, with Burt Rutan, hosted a lavish party to unveil SpaceShipTwo, the aircraft Rutan designed to carry Virgin Galactic patrons into space. “That’s how it all started for me, and the more and more I learned about the project, the more I realized how historic it was and how it was going to be right for our customers,” Bush says. “This is the next generation, the wave of the future. This is where adventure travel, experiential travel is going. And it’s not so much about the commission, but being in the ground floor of such a monumental project, it’s such an honor to be part of that.” And, for prices ranging from $20,000 to $200,000 per ticket, depending on the level BY LINDSAY LAMBERT 50 LUXURY TRAVEL ADVISOR | April 2008 http://www.parkavetravel.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Luxury Travel Advisor - April 2008

Luxury Travel Advisor - April 2008 Contents Publisher's Letter Editor's Letter London DESTINATIONS India Greece HOTELS Golf Royal Hideaway Playacar Chateau Marmont SPAS Hawaiin Spas Southeast Asia CRUISES: Antarctica Cover Story: Rocket man The Pulse Traveling Gourmet Jetset Sightings Source List

Luxury Travel Advisor - April 2008

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