We are excited to be included in an excellent New York Times feature on family travel and the life lessons gained through exposure to different cultures. Elevate Destinations is cited toward the end of the article as it details our combination of leisure travel with volunteer service. Please check it out!

“…Some parents are taking it a step further and combing leisure with volunteer work that focuses on local schools, orphanages and conservations. Abercrombie & Kent offers its clients that option of some trips, as does Elevate Destinations, a travel company based in Cambridge, Mass., that combines luxury excursions with trips that involve philanthropic missions.”

“People are becoming more exacting of the impact of what they invest in both financially and in terms of their time – they want to do something that makes a difference, ” said Dominique Callimanopulos, the founder of Elevate Destinations.

A recent client was Michele Gorski, of Glencoe, Ill., who, with her two children, 13 and 11, traveled to Costa Rica, where they hiked and surfed and stayed in a lovely eco-lodge. “We were taken care of in a manner that was magnificent – it just happened to be in the middle of nowhere.” But their activities also involved hiking a mountain with a conservationist tracking wild cats, and painting a latrine in a rural community.

It was a profound contrast to Glencoe, which Ms. Gorski describes as a beautiful, upscale community, “but not real.”

“When there is so much around you, you get no satisfaction of achievement. For my kids, climbing that hill, painting that bathroom were achievements,” she said.

Above all, she added, it showed them that “life is not Gencoe, Ill.”

The article can be found here: “Life Lessons for Children on a Family Vacation”