Senior Director, Global Sales
Jessica’s first meeting with adventure travel was in Tunisia, where she crossed the wind-whipped Sahara in a convoy of college students, sunbathed on the Mediterranean coast, and drank the tap water freely (learning a valuable travel lesson). It was a sublime introduction to Africa’s diversity and vastness. Since then, she has resided in Tanzania, safari’d in Botswana, trekked gorillas in the Republic of the Congo, and listened to the call to prayer from rooftops in Morocco—among many other exciting and humbling experiences memories from Africa’s incredibly diverse countries.
Culture, conservation, and community are often her impetus for travel, but the lasting memories are sometimes a surprise. A road trip in Mexico’s Baja Peninsula was planned to visit the calving grounds of the California grey whale, but equally as memorable was a night of unplanned and spirited card games with a host family (with the bonus of adding some new colorful words to her limited Spanish vocabulary). Bird-watching was the goal in Costa Rica, but a back-of-house sustainability tour left lasting impressions. And while the magnificent mosques and ruins of Iran did not disappoint, the story she repeats most frequently from that trip involves a humbling moment where a local restaurateur played the “Star-Spangled Banner” to honor the group of American guests who had just walked into his dining room.
Jessica is thrilled that she helps craft these moments for others as a travel specialist for GeoEx. One of her favorite parts of the process actually occurs after a trip has ended, when guests—sometimes months after they’ve returned from a hard-to-reach, harder-to-understand place like West Africa and Ethiopia—reach out to share a memory or a reflection.
