I don’t normally share my travels with you as this is a newsletter about the business of selling travel, but I would be doing you an injustice not sharing this experience.

I have been fortunate to visit many places, but never had the overwhelming desire to go to Tahiti.  So, when our good friend Sandy Stevens, vice president of sales for Paul Gauguin Cruises, invited my wife and me to join her and other travel advisers on a cruise this past January, I was less than enthusiastic at first.

Then I remembered that Tahiti receives roughly the same number of visitors in a year that Hawaii gets in a week! 

We flew into Papeete a few days early and took the 45 min ferry ride to Moorea.  We had booked the Intercontinental, however, there was a worker strike, so they moved us to the Sofitel at no extra cost.

Wow, what a first impression!  Moorea was beautiful, to say the least.  But even more so were the people.  They were the warmest, most generous people...