May 21, 2012

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What we have been up to…

October 1, 2010 By Shelby Saberon Leave a Comment

The Saberon family has been doing well. We are up to our ears in football games with our two oldest boys and yes, still traveling! Most of you know that I started Liahona Guided Tours about ten years ago and in that time we have conducted over 80 tours. We have had increasing demand for tours to our areas of expertise from groups outside of LDS circles, so this year I decided to expand and formed a new company called “The Passion Travel Company”. This company specializes in guided tours with a theme focus around people’s passions and hobbies. For LDS groups, the passion is obviously the scriptures, and touring with fellow LDS travelers who have similar interests and values. But my company can now accommodate groups of any type with any theme, such as photography, family history, painters, doctors, business men, humanitarian groups, you name it. We run the same high quality tours logistically and then just tailor the lectures and workshops to the group’s theme.

With the new company, I joined forces with one of my most successful friends and peers, Larry Hanson. Larry has extensive experience in European travel and adds tremendous business and technical expertise to the company (I will feature him later in a different newsletter).

We are still running our classic core programs, such as Book of Mormon tours to Guatemala, Mexico, or Belize, as well as our Holy Land tours to Israel, Egypt and Jordan, and our Machu Picchu tour to Peru. But we are using our system to develop tours to many new areas as well. Our focus is high quality small group tours (minimum of 10 people only!). My new personal area of interest is Asia (I have family roots there). In 2011, as I mentioned above, areas I will personally lead new tours to are China and Southeast Asia this next spring. China is the number 1 Asia destination, and I will co-direct a tour here with Sheldon Poon, who has conducted over 150 tours and has 30+years experience with groups here. I am probably the most excited about Southeast Asia, which has Angkor Wat and other amazing Khmer Civilization ruins in Cambodia. Hands down, this tour has the most incredible ruin in the world. Let me tell you, if you liked seeing Maya ruins or Machu Picchu with me, you will be absolutely blown away by this tour. Besides the ruins, the scenery is stunning beyond imagination, especially at the tiny spire-like island chains of Thailand and Viet Nam.

I am also open to directing tours to other areas (there has been interest in Greece and Peru with me as the director). If you have a tiny group of 10, we can make it happen. We are also developing tours right here at home. Our New York City tour is phenomenal, and has to be one of the great tours of the world. I am developing a twist on this tour by combining it with the US Open pro tennis tournament (with similar plans for Wimbledon & the French Open). It may seem odd to do a guided tour here on our own soils, but most who go to NYC on their own miss 80% of the best stuff and only hit a few main tourist attractions. Our guided tours in the U.S. will give you the maximum experience to classic US destinations, places like San Francisco and the Deep South (amazing guided tours, I had been to San Francisco four or five times but missed most of what you do there). With Larry’s European expertise, we will be doing tours all over Europe, including Italy, France, Iceland, the UK, the Adriatic (our Forgotten Kingdoms of the Alps tour), and more. These tours will range in theme from culture/history to cuisine, bicycling, tennis, and more. We have some private family history/family reunion tours going to places like Poland, where a group has rounded up their east coast Polish relatives (mostly non-LDS) for a fantastic tour to their ancestral homelands. Of Course, we continue to do the best Book of Mormon tours around, so if you have family and friends that you want to send with me, I would love to take them. I have 3 Book of Mormon tours in 2011: one classic, one extreme jungle to El Mirador (Bountiful candidate) and Laguna Lachua (Zarahemla candidate), and one to Belize (a fabulous tour with half jungle ruins and B of M, and half vacationing on an island in the stunning waters of the Caribbean, with snorkeling, scuba diving, sailing, deep sea fishing, deserted island picnics, and much more).

Many of our previous directors are still leading groups for us, and we have some fantastic new directors as well. If you have children our grand children in seminary, send them on our student tour with Scott Pearce and Ron Adams. These brothers have run four years of Book of Mormon trips with high school students, many of whom have had life changing experiences. In addition to my Book of Mormon tours, we have many other excellent directors here, including Mark Wright, one of our greatest up-and-coming LDS scholars. Mark is working on his Ph.D in Maya archaeology at UC Riverside and is a part time Book of Mormon instructor at BYU. He is world-class. We also added Stanley Guenter to our schedule. Stan is a world-famous Maya archaeologist/hieroglyph translator and has been mentioned frequently in National Geographic productions (magazine and documentary movies). Stan has been guiding tours since 2002 and has the academic AND tour director skill set to make every trip special. In 2011 he will be taking cultural tours for us to Mexico, Belize, Guatemala (regular and El Mirador), Southeast Asia, Egypt, and Peru and in 2012 will expand to Spain, the South Pacific Islands, China, Japan, and other locations.

I would like to keep in touch with you every six months (September/October and end of January) to let you know about our tour schedules, but I would also like to periodically send you a fun email newsletter, featuring interesting topics/studies from me and our directors such as scholarly info or other interesting information relating to the areas we travel to. We won’t send you an email more than once every 1-3 months and will never let your emails out so don’t worry about that (I hate spam!). Please email us if you don’t want emails from me. Emails are the main way we will keep in contact with you, so hope you don’t mind.

For more info on all our tours, keep an eye on our website: www.thepassiontravelcompany.com. I am super excited about this incredible new site. My partner Larry has been a main manager at places like weather.com (one of the most visited websites in the country) and recently built a huge weather website for NBC. He has worked at the highest levels in that industry, so it is a treat to have him creating this website. There will be director blogs, movie clips, and lots of fun features on the website, besides the descriptions of our tours. You can sign up securely for any tour right on the site.

Hope you are all having a great year and I wish you a wonderful fall season. Keep in touch!

Shelby H Saberon
Founder / Manager
The Passion Travel Company

Other tours and blog posts by Shelby Saberon

Filed Under Director's Blog

About Shelby Saberon
A 10-year seasoned tour director, Shelby founded Liahona Guided Tours, and recently co-founded The Passion Travel Company, which focuses on a variety of expert-guided tours world-wide. As far as logistics is concerned, Shelby has over 80 tours worth of experience and knows how to construct a tour of the highest quality. Shelby loves working with groups and directing tours, and his passion for culture, history, travel, and learning is infectious. With Shelby directing, you will have a fantastic tour and a smooth and worry-free experience.