Luxury Travel Advisor - April 2008 - (Page 51)

THE BUSH FAMILY (from left): Joshua, his wife, Jennifer, a teacher, his mother, Debbie and father, Craig, pause outside of Philadelphia’s Independence Hall. Photo by Maura B. McConnell of involvement and date of travel they desire, Park Avenue Travel’s aspiring astronaut clients will get to play a part in history, too. When the program rolls out, which could be as early as 2009, Virgin Galactic customers will spend up to three days undergoing the same intense training that Bush experienced before climbing aboard SpaceShipTwo for their sub-orbital flight into space. (Virgin Galactic will unveil its own spaceport and operations headquarters, Spaceport America, in New Mexico; until its opening, the first flights will depart from California’s Mojave Spaceport.) “The impact that this project has on the environment, the economy, the population— it’s neat stuff,” Bush says. “And it validates everything we’re doing, it validates the project, it makes me feel good about what I’m working for. It’s a transformational leadership—it’s taking an idea and putting an ethic behind it that elevates that idea to a higher level and really gets you passionate about what you’re working for, that you’re doing it for the good of humanity, or for the good of man. And yet we’re still talking about space travel on a rocket ride. I mean, how cool is that?” In light of this unabashed enthusiasm for Virgin Galactic and the proverbial blood, sweat and tears Bush poured into the application process, it may come as a surprise to those less familiar with the Bushes that, mere months before his partnership with Virgin was forged, Bush’s involvement with the family business—dad Craig is the company’s president, mom Deborah the vice president and manager—was something he vowed would never happen. “It was really a kind of comedy of errors how everything came together,” Bush says of his decision to join Park Avenue Travel during what the family now calls a fateful weekend in early 2006 at his parents’ vacation home in Wintergreen, VA. “We had gotten together for a weekend getaway after not having seen each other for quite some time,” says Bush, who then was a retention manager at Capital One. “Between Christmas and when I visited my parents over that Memorial Day weekend, they had gone on two fabulous trips; the first was a safari in Africa, and the other one was to Machu Picchu in Peru,” he says, referring to Virtuoso’s 2006 Chairman’s Recognition Event, the annual reward trip for the consortium’s highest-producing agency owners. “So the first time I get to see them in a long time, I have this photo album in my lap with 1,100 photos of lions, tigers, bears, all types of things. And as I’m flipping through the album, I realize that all the trips I got to take as a kid had dried up,” Bush says of the world travels he experienced early on as the offspring of agency-owning parents. “What I found is that where I was in my life, that travel passion, that bug that bit me at a very young age, that passion wasn’t being quenched anymore and I needed to figure out a way to do that.” Of his own inner conflict, in which he was embroiled at the same time, Josh’s father, Craig Bush, says: “It was really sort of unbeknownst to Josh that while we were on this Chairman’s Event in Peru, Debbie and I had been thinking, ‘Okay, what do we do with this business that we’ve been in for 20 years?’ We realized that we were at a point where www.luxuryta.com April 2008 | LUXURY TRAVEL ADVISOR 51 http://www.luxuryta.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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