“Anyone can build a trip to Rome, Paris and London, but it takes a special, dialed-in advisor to create an incredible itinerary to Sardinia and Corsica, Croatia and Slovenia, the Costa del Sol or in the incredible regions in the exotics.”
That’s Jeanne Polocheck, owner of Well Traveled Texan Luxury Travel, an agency in Houston that generates $10 million in revenue annually. Not bad for an agency that’s just eight years old, but Polocheck has a wealth of background that fueled her to her successful position today, including a career as a television producer and as an on-camera host of a travel television show and segments.
But first, a bit about the sophisticated luxury trips Polocheck and her 14 advisors create for their clients, many of whom are in Houston’s affluent energy corridor; others are successful athletes and celebrities across the country.
Villa rentals, helicopter transfers, hot air balloons and truffle hunts are just some of the amenities and activities Well Traveled Texan books. Arranging a meeting with the Pope in Rome and then jetting clients off to Lake Como to rest is also a no-brainer for the agency, which belongs to the Signature Travel Network.
“My favorite trips, however, are planning girls or couples’ trips for their 50th birthdays because they want it all—the fabulous hotel, private yachts, beach clubs, dinner reservations and we even bring in photographers to capture the moments in a journalistic style,” says Polocheck.
As an agency owner, she works closely with her own client base and once planned a surprise proposal for a client and his now wife in Punta Mita. The task at hand? Fly in all 60 of the couple’s friends to celebrate the engagement without the bride-to-be knowing it.
“She said ‘yes,’ at sunset on a rock in the Pacific. We pulled it off and she was so surprised,” says Polocheck, whose team has also hidden photographers in cable cars at the top of Mont Blanc in the Alps so a groom could propose to his girlfriend on the ‘step into the void’ glass that dangles above the Aiguille du Midi.
And then there were the times when the truly exotic wasn’t available. “During COVID, we had several clients who were booked on luxury African safaris, but when Europe began shutting down the flight routes, we had to think fast,” says Polocheck. “These clients still wanted to travel and loved wildlife, so we put our thinking caps on, became experts in the U.S. National Parks and created ‘American Safaris by Private Jet’ between Yellowstone, Grand Teton and Utah’s Canyonlands and Arches National Parks. Our clients still talk about seeing the most amazing animals and landscapes here in the U.S.,” she says.
The agency has three luxury travel advisors in Los Angeles who work with entertainment clients, says Polocheck. “They’re always a fun challenge because most of them have never planned their own trips; it’s either been a tour manager or production team that decided where they stayed, so they rely heavily on our advice for the best hotels and experiences.” She says a highlight was planning an incredible Italy itinerary for a musician to take his wife and children to Rome and Sardinia. “Seeing him experience it with his family was wonderful,” she notes.
Well Traveled Texan’s client roster includes several professional athletes who require some simple, yet unique needs when traveling. “With our NFL players, we need to make sure the hotel doesn’t have a footed or sleigh bed in the room, or our linebacker will spend the next five days curled up in the fetal position trying to get to sleep!” says Polocheck.
Many of her other clients are multi-generational families with older children in school or in their 20s who are still traveling together. Couples and small groups, usually comprising 10 to 20 people round out her client list.
“We do not work with large groups over 25—we know who we are and where we can add value,” says Polocheck. “We also don’t take on all clients; it has to be a good fit as far as budget, travel style (four- or five-star hotels) and private touring. We do everything to make it happen beautifully.”
The discerning strategy has worked out well as the agency has a number of repeat clients. “Trust is an earned asset and any of our clients will tell you once they do their first trip with Well Traveled Texan they can’t do another one without us!” says Polocheck.
New clients are referrals from current clients or from Instagram or Facebook. “Maybe a friend or family member is following us, @welltraveledtexan, and they tell a friend. It’s really the best for us because usually friends and family travel in a similar fashion and it helps vet our new clients,” she says.
A Unique Route to Success
At the age of 53, Polocheck is a relative newbie to the luxury travel advisor world. She launched Well Traveled Texan after a very successful career as a television producer and advertising manager in Washington, D.C., Houston and Los Angeles.
A self-described military brat, she moved frequently as a child with her three siblings and her parents, both members of the Air Force. Born in Alabama, she lived in Germany and France, lived for a stint in New Jersey and ended up in high school in northern Virginia. Polocheck then went to the University of Texas in Austin as an advertising and radio, television and film major.
After her parents retired from the Air Force in 1990, they purchased a Uniglobe franchise in the Washington, D.C. area. Polocheck and her sister printed out paper airline tickets and did hotel bookings during their summers home from college.
Polocheck’s father was booking corporate travel on contracts with the Pentagon, thanks to the contacts he earned in the Air Force and during his time as a defense contractor.
“He was one of the first travel agencies to send people to Cuba because he had contacts. And, so, when he opened up a travel agency, naturally that’s what he built his business on,” she says.
Ten years in, her parents sold the agency since Polocheck and her siblings wanted nothing to do with it. The timing wasn’t bad; the OTAs (online travel agencies) were starting to have an effect on the traditional travel agency business model.
Besides, Polocheck had another career in mind. After graduating from the University of Texas she headed back up to D.C. to work as a morning show producer for a news talk and sports radio station. The job required getting up at 4 a.m., not a role every 21-year-old would enjoy, but this early experience taught her a lot about tenacity, she says, particularly because communication was through pagers (cellphones were still to come).
One day, her engineer at the radio station told her that his wife, who headed the network news bureau at ABC News, was looking for a production coordinator. Polocheck interviewed for the role, and she got the job.
“This was one of those moments that you couldn’t plan. It was about really putting yourself into what you did and being serious about your job, having somebody notice that and then offer you an opportunity,” says Polocheck. She was just 23 and working on “This Week with David Brinkley,” the national Sunday program with Cokie Roberts, Sam Donaldson and George Will. It was great experience, but stressful, since on-air interviews were booked as the news was happening during the week, and the news was always changing.
After a year, she packed up her Mustang and moved to Dallas. Several of her friends from college lived there and she quickly found steady work as a freelancer producing television commercials for the big advertising agencies in Dallas. “We were producing commercials for American Airlines and Frito-Lay and KFC. It was very ‘Mad Men,’” she recalls.
After a year, it was back to D.C. to join the Greater Washington Interconnect, the advertising arm for the 13 Washington-area cable networks. Polocheck jumped right in, creating promotional videos for MTV and CNN and TNT and the Discovery Channel. After four years, she was transferred to Los Angeles where she worked in advertising and promotion for clients, including ESPN, Lifetime and Warner Brothers Television.
It was a busy time for her professionally and personally, Polocheck had already met her husband-to-be, Layne, and the two commuted between D.C., Houston and Los Angeles for two years to see each other. They eventually chose to settle in Houston since Layne worked for Shell Oil. She had little hope of finding a job in her industry, but it turned out Warner Brothers had a station there where Polocheck eventually became the station’s advertising manager. After moving over to the CBS affiliate, she decided to leave to produce her own television show illustrating how families can travel the world in a meaningful manner. She launched CultureLink Media; Polocheck and her two daughters, aged eight and 10 at the time, traveled to France, Greece, Malta and the National Parks, working in collaboration with tourism boards to produce a weekly television show on family travel. The CBS station that Polocheck had left aired the show, which ran in Houston, as well as Dallas and Austin.
After two seasons, the family wrapped the show so the girls could spend more time with school. It was 2015, and the local NBC station asked Polocheck to produce the travel and wine segments on a new daytime show called “Houston Life.”
“It was perfect,” she recalls. She came up with the name “Well Traveled Texan” and, savvy from past negotiations, had it written into her contract that she could keep that name when she left.
“I knew that if I were ever going to open up a travel agency, it would give us really good branding, especially on social media,” she says.
Polocheck was traveling the world and producing segments on Australia and Canada and other international destinations. Viewers were so engaged with her shows, they began asking Polocheck to plan trips for them.
In 2016, with the strong encouragement of her parents, she opened her travel agency and the name, “Well Traveled Texan” took on a new life.
The move was not an impulsive one. Polocheck had planned trips for friends and family and said she had no trepidation about starting the new business.
“I’m not really ever scared of anything going into it because I know I’m going to figure it out,” she tells Luxury Travel Advisor. “So once we got our IATA number, joined ASTA and were getting Sabre up and running, we figured out on the back-end how to actually make this a business and not a hobby. We determined how we were going to create revenue and how we would be able to pay salaries; it’s a huge responsibility as a business owner. But I knew that I had that figured out, I had researched a ton.”
That she had been able to travel well with her family over the years helped as well and Polocheck believes seeing the world is imperative for a good travel advisor. “Luxury clients will ask us specifically, ‘Have you been there?’ If we assign them to an advisor, they’ll ask, ‘Has that advisor been there? What is their experience level?’ Getting out there and taking FAMS is just like getting a master’s degree. You have to go out and do the work, and that’s when you become really successful and people start to trust you more,” she says.
Diversifying the Business
Polocheck had another new venture in the works; she opened a wine store around the same time. She had long been interested in wine and had earned her Level 1 and Level 2 designations with the Court of Master Sommeliers and her Level 3 with the Wine and Spirits Education Trust in London.
“I thought, if I’m going to open up a wine store, it’s really unfair for me to be selling wine that I don’t know anything about. It seemed disingenuous,” she says.
And so the fledgling travel agency in its early days operated out of the wine store in a 500-square-foot space. Polocheck ran it on her own for a few months until one of her closest friends, Laura Krugly, who had a strong sales background, asked to join her.
“She said, ‘I want to do this with you. I’m ready to go. I want to be a travel advisor!’” says Polocheck.
More advisors followed as her friends saw what she was doing and wanted to join in.
“My secret sauce is that the only person in our agency that has any experience as a travel agent, Louiza Deskin, is one who did corporate travel and event planning. She’s now our manager. Everyone else is similar to me in the sense that they had a very successful previous career before joining me,” says Polocheck.
“They were in medical sales or they were in software sales, so they can talk to clients. They also come to the table with a group of friends who travel like they do, or they’re a member of a country club. So their client base grows quickly.”
In those early days, social media helped grow the business substantially. Polocheck says she got most of her clients posting on Facebook and Instagram. “I could never have done it without Facebook, because in Houston there’s a lot of wealth because of the oil and gas business. There are a lot of these little subgroups inside these private groups inside Facebook that I’ve been a member of because I was just a mom with kids in school there. And someone would post, ‘Hey, I’m looking for a travel advisor. Does anybody know anybody?’ And then a bunch of my friends would say, ‘Hey, I heard Jeanne is doing this now; she’s Well Travel Texan from NBC.’ That’s what really spurred our business to grow really fast.”
The agency joined Signature in 2019; Polocheck liked that the Well Traveled Texan branding could stand alone with Signature as a blind partner.
“That was really important. I must have had six or seven conversations with (president and CEO) Alex Sharpe before they invited us in and we decided to join Signature,” she says. “I’ll never forget one of the last conversations we had, I said, ‘Alex, I’ve got six advisors who were all professional women. I have a growth plan for us. We are going to constantly ask questions and ask you guys to do better.’ And he said to me, ‘That’s why we want you.’”
When she got off that call, she said to her advisors, “Well, either they’re going to really love us or they’re going to really hate us; we’re going to get kicked out at some point or they’re going to ask me to be on the board. It’s going to be one or the other.”
Bottom line? It’s been a great relationship. “I love the family side of Signature and I’ve heard a lot of partners tell us that they feel like Signature is such a family when they go to their conferences, that it feels like they get more personal attention.”
It was 2019, however, and COVID within months moved in and shut down travel. Polocheck says that Signature made a huge effort to ensure that its owners were all okay and were getting their PPP loans.
“We were having once or twice weekly Zoom calls with Alex to see if anybody needed help renegotiating a lease or hiring an attorney. The support was unbelievable. And, so, we’ve never looked back,” she says.
Polocheck had her own survival strategy in place; she had moved her wine store/travel agency into a beautiful 1,500-square-foot office with a wine tasting area. The original idea had been to host tasting and wine-pairing classes for local residents and turn them into travel clients “because if people enjoy good food and wine, they are more likely to be luxury travelers,” says Polocheck, who knew from the beginning that it was a good idea to have multiple streams of revenue.
As COVID took its toll and her advisors toiled to cancel trips in their beautiful new office space, Polocheck amped up the wine business, which thrived because she also had a wine delivery permit. She alerted clients and friends on Facebook that they could deliver wine and her posts were well heeded.
“On Tuesdays at 12:01 p.m., we would get a ton of orders because all these moms were homeschooling their kids; so, literally, our driver would go up there, and there would be all these moms on their front lawns with their empty glass of rose just waiting for the wine to be delivered. I could not get wine delivered to us fast enough in order to get it right back out the door,” recalls Polocheck. “Our distributors told us we had the most inventory movement in terms of square footage in the Houston area because no one was going to the grocery stores.”
Post-COVID, the agency/wine store hybrid model continues to thrive. Clients who visit the office enjoy the concept, and Polocheck has added tastings and wine-pairings back into the mix.
“The space allows us to host events and bring clients in and get them ready before they go off to Italy or Greece or Australia. We can really teach them about the food and wine in the destination,” says Polocheck.
She has just renewed her lease for the next four years and loves how easy it is to entertain in the office. “When we have partners come, instead of us going out to a restaurant, we can host a wine-and-charcuterie tasting for them in the office. We feel it’s a more personal way to connect with partners and create lasting relationships. We have many partners who schedule their market trips around us and tell us we’re their favorite call,” she says.
She still gets calls from those wanting to join her team, but she plans to grow carefully, since her 14 advisors are a tight group, sharing a group text all day with questions and answers to travel.
On Fridays, many come into the office, and sit with their laptops on the agency’s big velvet couches. There’s great Wi-Fi, a kitchen and plenty of food delivery options to enjoy. “Sometimes our advisors don’t want to go home because it’s quiet and there are no kids here,” she says with a laugh.
Staying in Front of the Public
Polocheck hasn’t left television behind her; she still appears on travel segments on television news shows as the local expert. “We get a rush of leads after these, I just did an interview with CBS/KHOU 11 about honeymoon destinations and how to pick the right one,” she says. “As soon as it aired, we started getting leads through the website.”
These opportunities mean that the agency doesn’t have to pay for advertising. “All of our business comes organically through our advisors doing a great job with clients, traveling, posting on social media and talking about it to friends, family and people they meet playing tennis, golf, pickleball—whatever! That’s the beauty of travel—everyone does it.”
She is aware of the global issue of over-tourism and believes strongly that it’s the travel advisors’ job to encourage travelers to plan trips outside of the high seasons, such as summer and festive. “That also helps travelers who can only afford a three- or four-star experience during the high season book a five-star experience in the shoulder or low seasons,” she says. “This is how we get many of our clients to break out of their budgets and explore places like Peru over Spring Break in March when it’s green and lush—and less expensive (instead of the Caribbean’s crowds and over-the-top pricing) or Africa outside of the June-to-September migration. We planned an advisor team trip to South Africa in April and it was fantastic, which helped us convince clients they can do it, too. Advisors need to educate themselves so they can be true catalysts for their clients’ choices.”
She says she can only be optimistic about the future of luxury travel, evidenced by factors like the post-COVID back-to-traveling boom and pent-up budgets allowing clients to try their first private experiences.
“People learned to slow down, enjoy travel more with fewer people and to try luxury. While the pandemic taught us all lessons in kindness and patience, in many ways it also forced travelers to experience how much more pleasant and approachable custom travel is where you’re able to build out the exact trip you want, when you want to go and hire a professional travel advisor to make it perfect for you. All clients have to do is show up,” says Polocheck.
This is also a great era for luxury travel advisors, she says. “So many great destinations are realizing that they need to reach out to luxury travel advisors to bring them visitors. I think the market is really being driven now by luxury land experiences and clients wanting to go where our secret places are as travel advisors. Finding the partners who can deliver luxury off-the-beaten-path itineraries is very exciting,” says Polocheck.
Similarities Between TV Producers and Travel Advisors
Jeanne Polocheck’s career as a television producer melds well with her career as a travel agency owner and advisor.
“It’s so funny because I feel like every travel advisor is a producer,” she tells Luxury Travel Advisor. “It’s the same set of skills. You have a beginning and an end to the trip. As a producer, you have a beginning and an end, whether you’re producing a film, a television show or a radio show, and you have to be super detail-oriented.”
Her military upbringing also established her skills to be a travel advisor: “I’m very Type A and I’m very regimented. I was also a latchkey kid when I grew up. Our parents didn’t come home until 6, and we would do our homework in front of the television. I was obsessed with commercials. I thought that they were little TV shows. If we were going to a grocery store, I could tell you every single make and model of the cars in the parking lot, I’d seen so many car commercials on TV,” says Polocheck.
"I just love producing because it feels like you have this great idea and you bring people on board who believe in the idea, and then you move along in a linear fashion, just like you would do as a travel advisor. You’re going to book the flights first, then you’re going to do the hotels, but you’re going to start with this big idea that this family’s going to Lake Como and this is how I’m going to get them in and out, and this is what I want them to do every single day. It’s the same skillset we would use producing anything, but my true passion is trying to put something together that means something to the family that’s traveling and creates a memory. So whether that’s, as a producer, you’re creating an end product that is going to move somebody in some way.
“Good or bad, whether it’s a horror film or a soap opera, it’s going to create an emotion. And I feel like trips are the same thing. When you’re doing a travel itinerary it’s so important. We tell our new advisors this: that you really have to want to do this and you have to really commit to it because most Americans may only get two weeks of vacation a year. So, it’s not just their budget that you’re playing with and trying to make work, it’s the time with their family and they don’t ever get that back. And it’s super important that you take that really seriously and spend their money as if you would spend it on your own trip. If they tell you that they have a luxury budget and they want everything seven-star, that’s what you have to deliver because that’s their expectation. It’s the same thing if we’re booking a four-star trip somewhere and the client’s giving us a budget, that’s what we’re here for. I mean, the only reason why you would hire a travel advisor is to make sure that this person’s giving you the best trip possible because they can’t do it themselves.”
Well Traveled Texan Luxury Travel
Owner: Jeanne Polocheck
Headquarters: Houston, TX
Annual Revenue: $10 million-$12 million
Agency Team: 14 advisors: four in house, plus independent contractors in Houston, Austin, TX; Los Angeles and Annapolis, MD.
Founded: 2016
Affiliations: Signature Travel Network
Social: Instagram @WellTraveledTexan
Website: Welltraveledtexan.com
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