It all started when…

Three years ago I stood in the back garden of a Villa I used to visit in Lucca and looked at the beautiful view and blurted out to no one but myself “I am going to bring women back here.” I have never had that experience before, where you declare an intention you didn’t even know you had. I turned around and walked into the villa and spoke to my friends Siobhan and Laura and did it again. “I am going to bring women back here.” Good thing for all of you my friends are in the hospitality business! Siobhan and Laura found us this fabulous villa and an amazing chef and the rest is history.

I had no intention of starting a business. I had just started a travel blog called The Island Hopper and intended to write about my own travel experiences and favorite travel tips. When the idea came to me to bring women to beautiful Tuscany, I thought I’d rent a villa for ONE week and take some glorious gals on a tour of my favorite spots. I wanted to share the place I loved so much. I made a plan with my two friends in Tuscany and left Lucca in a whirlwind with my husband Donald to get to Corfu to jump on a boat with some college BFFs. My roommate from St Lawrence Jenny Davlin is a career hospitality expert. I looked at her over coffee one morning on the catamaran, as we sailed the Greek Islands and said “so I just rented a villa in Tuscany.” And we laughed and laughed ‘til tears streamed down our faces. My Jenny pulled out a paper towel and a pencil and taught me how to launch a travel business. The Island Hopper was born! The only witness to this hilarious moment was our catamaran captain named Nemo, a Serbian joy who looked exactly like Brad Pitt. Nemo thought it was a great idea and Jenny and I agreed.

So I pulled out my phone and put in my Instagram stories a photo of Tuscany with the sentence “I am going to rent a villa in Tuscany, does anyone want to come?” And three hundred of you said yes!!

By the end of this year we will have taken 140 women to the villa, 45 women to Vermont, and 17 men and women Kenya.

My name is Tricia Heaton, and I am the hostess of creative retreats in Europe, Africa, and the Americas. It happened by accident but I am damn happy it did!!!

If you have ever heard Sarah Blakely, the founder of Spanx talking about her business, she often goes back to one specific theme, failure. She says that her father used to ask them what they failed at every night at dinner. He told them if they weren’t failing, they weren’t trying hard enough. I have thought about that a lot over the past few years. I try and find the failures so I can make things better.

There is one big failure I have had in starting this business.

I completely underestimated the friendships which would be formed on these trips. In fact, it wasn’t even a consideration. As a total travel nerd, art buff, and retired high school teacher, I was focused on the planning of every detail of each trip, planning of the adventures, and the creative opportunities I wanted to present. There was one big thing I missed that caught me completely off guard. It was the friendships. Now had I had any inkling, I never would have advertised it! I am from New York!! We don’t do that stuff. We don’t say “Come to Italy and meet your new best friends”. I WOULD NEVER GO ON THAT TRIP!!

Man, I did not see this coming!

I thought everyone would go home with a new friend. (I am teary typing this.) I had nooooooo idea. Literally no idea of the MAGIC that was going to happen. You take a group of women, women of a certain age, confidence, and experience…and move them across the globe or the country…and sprinkle a little adventure magic… and sit back and watch the beauty of sisterhood develop. Courteney and I have certain seats we sit in at the Villa and we look down the dinner table and watch it unfold. More than half the women come solo and those who come with someone else completely blend in. Each night dinner gets more animated. The OG’s, our first group, called the quiet ones “the sleeper cells”. These are the gals who come in all quiet and a bit reserved. By the end of the week they are mucking it up with the rest of them, revealing their fabulous humor.

It is like each woman is a colorful thread and together they weave into a gorgeous tapestry.