Peter Carideo: CRC Travel

January 13, 2009 By: Ruthanne Terrero Luxury Travel Advisor

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CRC Travel
Owner/President: Peter Carideo
Location: Chicago, IL
Number of agents: Five in office; two
additional outside agents
Number of locations: One
Annual volume of business: $9.5 million
Affiliation: Signature Travel Network (updated)
Website: www.crctravel.com

An irreverent sense of humor is one of Peter Carideo’s trademarks. Upon accepting a top producer’s award from Classic Vacations on stage in Maui last year, Carideo, who is the owner/president of CRC Travel in Chicago, quipped, “Where’s my car?” in mock dismay as the company’s chairman, Ron Letterman, handed him a plaque.  When Carideo reveals that in college he majored in Spanish and minored in business, he admits that he had big plans for a career in diplomacy. “I thought the UN would want me desperately. They didn’t,” he states in deadpan fashion, but with a gleam in his eye.

But while the suppliers who work with Carideo may grin upon hearing his name and regale a tale or two of hours spent laughing with the luxury agent, they are also quick to point out that the business he sends their way is phenomenal. Over the top. We’re talking about booking the ultimate suites in the best hotels, securing private yacht charters for clients celebrating their 50th, and customizing exhilarating land programs for some of America’s wealthiest.

Who is Peter Carideo? He is a native New Yorker who owns CRC Travel in the Lincoln Park section of Chicago. The single-location, store-front agency opened in 1990, and today earns close to $10 million a year in revenue. A top producer for Abercrombie & Kent, Four Seasons, The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company and Classic Vacations, Carideo is the real deal, as one sales representative who works closely with him described him to Luxury Travel Advisor.

After spending just a few hours with Carideo, we decided that that deep, genuine respect must come from the fact that he is also fiercely meticulous and earnest when it comes to creating remarkably memorable travel programs for his high-end clientele.
Case in point: Carideo recently worked with a client who wanted to surprise his beloved with an engagement ring while on vacation in London. The luxury travel advisor arranged for the couple to have an 8 p.m. dinner reservation and for the meal to end sharply at 10 p.m., no matter what. Why the rush, you ask?

“When they walked out of the restaurant, amazingly, this horse and carriage was going by, and he flagged it down,” says Carideo. “Underneath the seat was a bouquet of a dozen red roses and a bottle of champagne. They drove to the front of Buckingham Palace, where I had a violinist waiting, who jumped on the back of the carriage and began playing their song, which was ‘An Affair to Remember,’ and the client proposed to her.”

In another instance, a Carideo client who had purchased a work by an Old Master wanted to visit the field in the south of France where it had been painted. The only problem was the field had to be located first. Carideo found an on-site company in Provence called Découvertes. “I told them, ‘Here is my challenge: I have this client, he has this painting. We know it was painted in the south of France, but we need to find this location and I need an art historian to take him there and see it.’ So we e-mailed the picture to France, found someone from the University of Southern California who happened to be in the south of France on sabbatical, found the location and flew the client via private helicopter to the field where the work was painted.”

“For every request we get, there is always an answer. It’s just a matter of figuring it out,” says Carideo, adding that he unwittingly created his first FIT years ago when he chartered a Buddy Bombard balloon ride over France. “I booked first-class air, chartered a balloon and then expanded on that, deciding what they would do the day before that and the day after.” Following that, Carideo’s credo became customization, a selling style that takes a bit of courage to embrace.“It’s all about getting over that fear,” he says.

Another credo he’s embraced is the act of bundling the cost of a trip; when Carideo creates a program for a client, it comes with one price and one price only, and that’s a firm policy.

“Clients will often ask the cost of the hotel and the car; I have to educate them and say, ‘I am not going to be able to break this down, so don’t ask me,’” he says. “I don’t want someone telling me what I am going to make anymore. That’s what the whole commission thing was about—is it 10 percent, 12 percent or 15 percent? I don’t want that. I want to be able to drive my business, and by drive it, I mean customizing everything. When I create a program, we tell the client that when they leave their front door they can stop thinking until they get back into that front door. There are clients who thrive on knowing they’ve got somebody in the States ushering them through every step of the way.”

When he receives a request for a trip from a new client, Carideo asks for a wish list from them and also generates a full, detailed profile.

“I’ll say, ‘Tell me anything about yourselves. Do you like architecture, are you cooks, are you in good shape?’” After he feels he has a good sense of an itinerary that will work for them, he’ll contact his on-sites for input.

Another proven selling strategy for CRC Travel is selling from the top down; Carideo says that when he gets a trip request he’ll first load an itinerary with everything he can think of so that he can then whittle it down to suit the clients’ desires and budget. “I always offer suites first, then junior suites and then deluxe rooms,” he says.

The core of Carideo’s book of business comprises five or so key individuals; when one of those “bread-and-butter” clients contacts him, he drops everything to tend to them. This group of what Carideo calls “heavy hitters” came to him via a friend who subsequently became a client, and a pied piper of sorts. Until working with Carideo, these elite customers had not experienced the joys of customized travel even though they had the means to pay for it. They apparently had just not found the right travel agent yet.
“It was exciting for me—I vividly recall asking one of them, ‘Why don’t we do a private tour of the Vatican?’ and he said, ‘You can do that?’”

Celebrity clients, whom Carideo discreetly does not name, are also part of his business roster. “I do have some people who are well known and very private. It makes me feel good that it’s me they picked. They are the nicest and easiest to work with. They are honest and up front. With them, it’s cut and dry. I think all of my clients are celebrities; it’s taken 17 years to get them,” he says with a smile.

Another business strategy for Carideo comes from simply having good manners. When one of his existing clients sends him a strong referral, Carideo’s policy is to pick up the phone without hesitation to thank them personally. “This caliber of client does not need anything I can send them, so I pick up the phone and vow that I will do a good job for them. That is something we lose sight of. It all comes back to image.”

The move toward a true luxury image came in a moment of revelation in the early days of CRC Travel: Carideo and his then-partner, Sharon Rozansky, didn’t have a car because, well, they couldn’t afford one. As they waited for a bus one day to take them to an appointment, a Mercedes pulled up to them, and one of their clients exclaimed, “What are you two doing here?”

“We said that our car was in the shop, but right then it clicked. ‘Image.’ The next day we went out and leased a car,” laughs Carideo, who then also began sharpening his knowledge of the luxury market, paying his own way to stay in Four Seasons-, Ritz-Carlton- and Peninsula-branded hotels throughout the world.

“At that point we were nobody, but the only way to learn was to go and do it. To this day I have no issue paying for something, because I know it will come back to me in sales,” he says.

While CRC Travel early on skewed heavily toward corporate travel, today it’s 95 percent leisure by choice, working on hand-selected small corporate accounts. In fact, Carideo will only do business with those he chooses to, and will “fire” a client if necessary.
“I have gotten rid of the screamers, and it’s taken years to do that,” he says. “I am the first to admit that every time you let a client go you wonder if you are doing the right thing, but I trust my instinct so much more now.”

When Carideo decides to end a client relationship, which he’s done a number of times, he usually does it in writing by messenger “because then there is documentation and there’s no emotion. I will write a letter and say, ‘We are sorry we are unable to meet your expectations. We feel you would be best suited by using another agency. Best wishes in your search.’ Some eventually come back to him, he says, but when they do, their behavior has changed dramatically “and the playing field has been leveled.”

Carideo is equally selective when it comes to working with suppliers; preferring to work with  a few, he’ll find just one person in the reservations department of the larger companies with whom he’ll form a rapport, and then work exclusively with him or her. For example, with Classic, which he likes to use for its 24/7 help line, its liberal cancellation policy and the fact that he can sell its products in components, he has a relationship with one reservations agent from whom he gets an immediate response.
“If you can find someone who understands you and your business, things happen,” he says.

For his part, he won’t go to his contact with idle requests. “I don’t ask for things unless I know I am going to deliver,” says Carideo.

At Abercrombie & Kent, he has a contact who does most of his custom work. “I can tell her who the person is, that budget is not an issue, but that I need to wow them, ‘so come back to me with a hot-air balloon over the Serengeti.’ Or if it’s Bangkok, let’s go to someone’s home for lunch. We once did a yacht trip in southern France for just the day— try to rent a yacht in southern France for the day!”

While Carideo’s specialty is selling over-the-top-travel, he is incredibly hands-on as a business owner. He opens the mail every day, handles TRAMS and sends out commission statements. He also keeps a close ear on agents in his office as they sell. “I can listen to five conversations at once and if I hear something that may be incorrect, or that we should have handled differently, I’ll shoot that person a quick e-mail. My name is on the door; everything that walks out of it has my name on it,” he says.

The atmosphere in the office is still fun, he says. “I am irreverent and it’s wild—we have XM Satellite Radio in the office and we play the music from the forties and we’re always dancing. I always say ‘Thank God for the mute button!’”

There is also a full bar in the office. “I always said we’d have that around because people will spend more when they drink. Mothers will drop their kids at play dates and say, ‘Can I come in for a martini?’ It’s not rocket science. Make them comfortable!” he says.
CRC Travel currently has five agents, and Carideo is not looking to expand that dramatically; in fact, he is looking for just one more good agent. “Just one,” he emphasizes. “After that, you lose control. I am at a point where, with the business I am handling personally, I am feeling a little pulled. I project going at this pace for some time more,” he says. After that, he may explore expanding a relationship he has with Protravel, through which he already has a variety of marketing agreements, which were forged after he and Priscilla Alexander (Protravel’s president) served together on the Preferred Hotels Advisory Board and struck up a friendship.

For now, Carideo alleviates the stress of running a $10 million single-location agency by getting up at 4:40 a.m. daily to work out with a personal trainer at the gym. From May through September he spends Thursdays through Sundays at his weekend home in Michigan, where he has a small office. His key accounts have his phone number there and he’s also able to work as if he were in his Lincoln Park location, thanks to a program called “GoToMyPC.com,” which enables him to access everything on his office desktop remotely.

Carideo travels in spurts to make contacts in the industry; because his time is precious, he prefers events wherein he can meet many people in one place, such as the annual Ensemble Travel Conference. Carideo joined Ensemble in 1998 for its marketing benefits; he now considers himself part of a core group that is always encouraging leadership to raise the bar. “The challenge is that there are no term limits on the board and there are people who have been on the board 35-plus years. It’s frustrating to me that they have never instituted them,” he says, noting “I would go out for the board because change is really good and I really believe in it.” (Update: In 2009, CRC Travel joined the Signature Travel Network.)

Carideo credits Ensemble Travel with dramatically increasing the quality of its on-site program over the past two years so that he could better serve his luxury clients on the ground throughout the world. He says he and several other Ensemble members fought to enhance the program so that they could better compete with agents within Virtuoso, which has a strong on-site program. “Last year it really hit. Ensemble’s Suzanne Hall goes out and solicits new on-sites and there are a number of them now, many more so than when they started,” he says. “These are the people who make me look good.”
Carideo currently sits on Starwood’s Luxury Collection/St. Regis advisory board. When he was asked to join, he cautioned that they wouldn’t want him, “because I am not like the old guard,” says Carideo. “I am working and I know the others are, too, but in a different capacity. I want to talk about issues, like how the GDS doesn’t work for me, for example. That’s the only board I’m on right now, and that’s by choice. It does take time, and every minute I’m out of the office I am not selling and it affects my bottom line. So it really has to be of value to me.”

Not surprisingly, Carideo loves to travel for personal reasons, in particular to Italy. He’s always loved Rome, but he recently fell in love with Tuscany when he rented a villa there with 18 friends. [For villa rentals, he uses the Toronto company Homesaway (www.homesaway.com)].

“I am a huge proponent of getting a group together and renting villas. I also did a Silversea cruise with a group of friends a couple of years ago and we had a great time,” he says. “It’s all about the people you’re with.”

Travel in general can be a challenge, he says, because he always notices when something is not quite right. “I could be walking down the hallway of a hotel and see scuff marks and think, ‘This is not good.’ You can’t get out of that mode. That’s why 99 percent of the time I pay for my travel, because then I am able to be honest about what I experience.”

 While time is sacred to this busy luxury travel advisor, he does have one significant trip coming up. To celebrate his 50th birthday, he is asking 12 of his closest friends to join him on a celebratory trip to South Africa, which he is booking through Abercrombie & Kent.

“I’m doing it for myself, which is something I never do,” he says. In the end, however, Carideo feels the experience will help his bottom line. “I create this type of program for so many clients. I have one client who is turning 60 and is bringing 25 people on a Crystal Cruise. Another is turning 50, so he chartered a yacht in Greece for his family and friends.

“How could I not do this for myself when the people I work for are doing it? And if I want to do more of it, I’d better know the value of it!” he says.