Labbé Travel makes luxury travel easier than ever
Summer/Fall 2021
Written By: Evie Carrick
| Images: Courtesy Labbé Travel
Imagine booking a vacation with a single text. Forget about trying to nail down flights and researching hotels and restaurants and imagine if it was all done for you — to perfection. That’s the power of Labbé Travel, a travel agency with Jackson Hole roots that makes accessing the world easier than ever.
“It’s as simple as a text message,” confirms Tony Labbé, who owns and operates Labbé Travel with his wife, Caroline. “I need to leave on this date and come back at this date. I can’t say that I’ve actually booked an entire safari by text message ... but almost.”
It’s that ease of booking and attention to detail that keeps Labbé Travel just a step ahead of the rest. And they don’t just take care of flight logistics, airport transfers, hotels, and restaurant reservations, they specialize in once-in-a-lifetime experiences you would never be able to arrange yourself — after- hour access to museums and dinner underneath Michelangelo’s David. If you can imagine it, Labbé Travel has probably done it.
“Our demographic is pretty well traveled already, and we have very discerning clients,” explains Tony, who says they take care of “anything from the mundane — booking plane tickets so they don’t have to do it online themselves … or as much as private plane charters or trips to Antarctica or Machu Picchu or anything in between.”
It doesn’t matter whether you need a last-minute flight to Denver or an over-the-top anniversary trip to Botswana — Labbé Travel has you covered. And while Tony says they pride themselves on “taking care of everything — dotting all the I’s and crossing all the T’s,” perhaps their most standout offering is their affiliation with Virtuoso, an invite-only luxury travel network, that connects Labbé with on-the- ground travel specialists all over the world. Thanks to those local connections, Labbé is able to tap into local intel to secure the best rooms and bespoke experiences. It also gives Labbé’s clients unparallelled support while they’re traveling.
Tony remembers a client who packed her glasses and contacts in her checked luggage, which was lost en route to Peru. Rather than letting it ruin or delay their trip to Machu Picchu, Tony’s local contact was able to get an ophthalmologist to open their office — on Easter Sunday — and get the client a pair of replacement glasses and a box of contact lenses. The client never had to alter her plans and when the missing luggage finally arrived, it was shipped directly to her hotel in Machu Picchu.
Talk about service.
In addition to working as ground control and vacation concierge from their offices in Jackson Hole and Park City, Tony and Caroline do their own on-the-ground research for clients. When I spoke to Tony, he and Caroline had just returned from a trip to Morocco — a trip that included a visit to the Sahara on camelback to catch the sunset and a morning hot air balloon ride over Marrakech with a full, fresh breakfast served mid-flight. By experiencing a trip like this for themselves, the Labbés are able to use their discerning eye to nix certain hotels, restaurants, and experiences so their Morocco-bound clients can enjoy all of the highs without having to weather any of the lows.
“When a client wants to go somewhere special, we make it special,” says Tony, who explains that they don’t book any pre-organized, set-departure type of trips — “everything we do for every client is very custom.”
Their customized level of service is clearly working. Tony says most of the people they work with are repeat clients who trust Labbé Travel to remember everything from their taste in hotels to their airline seat preferences. That attention to detail and dedication to service ensures that every trip — be it to Thailand, South Africa, or Spain — is planned to perfection.
