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Honoring ETC’s Longest-Standing Advisory Council Members, Delegates, and Partner Advocates

Carolyn Sheaff is retired director of the BEAR TREKS Travel Program, California Alumni Association in Berkeley, California, and an Educational Travel Conference Emeritus Council member. From 1983 to 2005, Sheaff was responsible for the development and administration of an educational travel program that annually enrolled approximately 1,300 travelers on 35+ domestic and international tours. Directing a program of this size was accomplished primarily by partnering with 14-16 professional wholesale group tour operators annually. Sheaff has attended Educational Travel Conferences for the last 23 years. She served as a NPTC Jumpstart moderator and panelist for 10 years, was an ETC Advisory Council member for 13 years, and is a member of the NPTC (ETC) Coalition, which monitors IRS Tax Exempt Organization travel program guidelines and unrelated business income tax (UBIT) issues. She remains actively involved with the ETC Conference as organizer and co-facilitator of its Executive Forum. Sheaff received her B.A. degree from University of California, Berkeley, in political science and is currently engaged in educational group tour consulting for tour operators and alumni associations, tour managing, and editing travel brochures. Sheaff believes that her interest in global understanding through educational group travel and academic tourism continues and is strengthened year after year by the knowledge she gains and the people she meets at the Educational Travel Conference.

Peter Voll is presently a consultant and advisor to tourism ministries and tour operators in the Middle East, India, and Greece. He also provides his services to U.S. non-profit travel planners on a pro bono basis. Voll was director of the Stanford Alumni Travel/Study Program for 18 years. This was followed by 17 years as a tour operator at Peter Voll Associates and High Country Passage. As the director of Stanford Alumni Association Travel/Study from 1974 to 1993, Voll developed the program from three trips in 1973 to 45 in 1992, including many direct charters of cruise ships and riverboats, which made Stanford’s alumni travel program the most financially successful in the country. He established Peter Voll Associates Travel Planning in 1983 as an independent venture, and in 1993 left Stanford to devote himself full time to PVA. After 9/11, Voll merged with High Country Passage, now World Leaders Travel. During his 37 years in educational travel, Voll has designed and implemented more than 200 different faculty-led tours to U.S. and worldwide destinations by land, ship, train, riverboat, and private jet charter. He has launched a number of travel industry firsts: in 1992, some of the first tours for American educational groups into Saudi Arabia, which was not actually open for tourism at the time; in 1995 the first voyages to the Arabian Gulf between Kuwait and Oman; in 1992 the first university alumni association charter of a Russian nuclear-powered icebreaker to reach the North Pole (with Society Expeditions); the first private jet expeditions in 1991 to remote kingdoms in Africa and the Galapagos Islands; in 1986 the first exploration of the western regions of Hudson Bay by expedition cruise ship (with Society Expeditions); the first tourist trips to the People’s Republic of China in 1978 (with Travel Dynamics); and the first alumni tours to Burma in 1979 (with Travel Dynamics). Voll organized 40 charters of the Delta Queen Steamboat on the Mississippi, Ohio, Arkansas, and Tennessee-Tom Bigbee rivers. He also organized a series of private train trips over the Montana Rail Link. His favorite all-time trips were those that he developed in the Hopi and Navajo Lands in the 1970s. Voll has served as a consultant in developing educational tours for a number of tour companies, including Special Expeditions (now Lindblad Expeditions), Clipper Cruise Line, TCS Expeditions, and Zegrahm Expeditions. In addition, he consulted for the National Geographic Society and the Discovery Channel on the development of their travel programs. Voll is a fourth-generation Californian from the central San Joaquin Valley and a graduate of Stanford University, receiving his B.A. in Political Science. He has twice served as a member of the Educational Travel Conference Advisory Council and is a long-standing member of the ETC Emeritus Council. He attributes much of his successful career to the support of his spouse, Suzanne, who had her own successful career. Peter and Suzanne Voll have four children and six grandchildren and have lived in Palo Alto for nearly 32 years.

Pauline Ranieri, Director of UW Alumni Tours for the University of Washington Alumni Association, has been in the travel industry for over 20 years. She began her career as a travel director with Contiki Holidays—a leader in the 18-35 year old travel market—leading tours around the United States and Europe, and then moved into the position of operations manager for the U.S. market. Pauline has been with UW Alumni Tours since 1991, and currently manages a program that offers a variety of affinity tours supported by more than 800 travelers. She holds a B.A. in Journalism from the University of Montana. Ranieri is a member on ETC’s Executive Advisory Council.

R. Todd Nielsen has been directing non-profit, educational tour programs for 31 years. He currently directs Eos study tours, a management organization that administers the travel programs of several non-profit institutions, including the Archaeological Institute of America, The American Geographical Society, and The Explorers Club. He has served as director of travel programs of several other organizations, including the American Museum of Natural History (14 years), Denver Museum of Nature and Science (six years), and National Wildlife Federation (four years). Nielsen founded Eos in 1993 to offer non-profit organizations a complete and risk-free management service for their travel programs. He has traveled to more than 80 countries, many of them multiple times. He has helped pioneer many new tours, including the first-ever non-profit educational voyages throughout Indonesia, circumnavigation of Antarctica, as well as the first non-profit study tours using submersibles to take travelers to deep sea vents and sunken shipwrecks, including ancient Roman ships, the battleship Bismarck and the Titanic. Nielsen is a graduate of Collegiate School in New York City and Brown University in Rhode Island. He resides with his wife and teenage son in the town of Walpole, New Hampshire. Nielsen is a member of the ETC Emeritus Council having served on the first Advisory Councils 1987 - 1989.

Karen Ledwin is Vice President of Programming and Operations at National Geographic Expeditions. Ledwin came to National Geographic Society post 9/11 to be Director of Marketing after having worked for Saga Holidays as Vice President of Educational Programs. At Saga, Ledwin developed the Road Scholar Program and oversaw Smithsonian Odyssey Tours. Previous to this, she was head of Marketing at Academic Travel (ATA). Ledwin started at ATA as Director of Museum Programs replacing Mara DelliPriscoli, who had moved on to found the Educational Travel Conference. Ledwin began her career in educational travel working for SUNY Stony Brook as resident director of its study abroad programs with three Polish universities.

Marjorie McHenry Bride, Vice President, Special Interest Groups, Odysseys Unlimited, came to the travel business from a background in economics, urban planning and commercial real estate. Born in Baltimore, MD, and a graduate of Bryn Mawr College in Economics and the University of Pittsburgh in Urban Planning, she was a developer of historic properties in Portland’s Old Port district. She did her first group tour of the Maine Coast for Smithsonian Journeys almost 20 years ago, a true learning experience, and subsequently attended one of the first ETC conferences, which was then held on Dupont Circle in D.C. She became Founder and President of Experience Maine, subsequently Atlantic Cultural Odysseys, a cultural tour company providing custom-designed domestic educational and cultural tours for art museum and other non-profit interest groups. In 1989 Bride’s company was bought out by Odysseys Unlimited under the direction of President Bruce Epstein; she has helped to develop the Special Interest Group department of Odysseys, which provides high-quality small group tours to alumni and other special interest organizations. In her spare time, Bride enjoys her vacation house outside of Portland, Maine, her friends, and her grown children. She has participated in a number of athletic events, including the Boston Marathon and tennis tournaments, and she competed in the National Senior Games in Palo Alto, CA, in the summer of 2009. Bride also serves on the Advisory Board of Outward Bound and the boards of several other organizations providing scholarships and life-changing experiences to diverse populations.

Linda Witt is Director of Sales & Client Relations/Educational Travel for USI Travel Insurance Services. She is one of the two long-term employees celebrating her 20th anniversary with TIS in February. Witt is an only child who hails from tiny Reidsville, GA, which is known only as home of the Georgia State Prison and the growing of Vidalia Onions. She has been involved with the Educational Travel Community throughout her career and has found the people in this community to be the greatest group to work with. She now serves as the main contact and advocate for Educational Travel clients in all matters related to their travel insurance programs. During the last 20 years she has seen this area of the business grow from a very small program to a multi-million dollar endeavor. Her first ETC, or Nonprofits in Travel Conference, as it was called back then, was in 1991, when the conference was held at Dupont Circle. Since that time, she has watched this small, closed conference transform into the current conference we now attend with speakers and suppliers from all around the world. In her leisure time, Witt enjoys traveling, antiquing, and knitting. Her special passion is breeding and showing her beloved Pharaoh Hounds.

TOURISME QUEBEC
LONGEST-STANDING PROVINCIAL PARTNER

Jean Bouffard is the Senior Advisor for Market Strategy for the United States and Canadian markets at Tourisme Quebec. He advises the Quebec Government Office of Tourism on advertising and market development initiatives and also coordinates the operations of the organization’s four field offices in both countries. Liaising with the major U.S. leisure travel trade associations, he manages Tourisme Quebec’s funding for joint marketing ventures with a select number of key tour operators, consortias, and online travel agencies. Active in the tourism industry for over 30 years, Bouffard has covered most aspects of tourism sales and promotion. Starting as a tour director, he spent several years in New York City as regional director of tourism for the Government of Quebec. He holds a master’s degree in Communication Sciences from Université de Montréal, and he also attended the Georgetown School of Foreign Service as a guest fellow.

LONGEST-STANDING PARTNER INITIATIVE ADVOCATE

Frank LaFleche has been involved in the tourism industry for the past 40 years. He has held a number of positions that relate to his present occupation of the last five years with the Jordan Tourism Board North America, where he is responsible for market development of Jordan in Canada. Prior to this, he was with the Canadian Tourism Commission for 20 years in Washington, D.C. During his earlier career he worked in sales and marketing with SABENA World Airlines and subsequently with Canadian Pacific Airlines, both in Canada and in Europe. Following his airline experience, he was employed by the Canadian Government in Tourism and Trade. His employment with government provided him an opportunity to manage several marketing sales functions that had both national and international implications. Most noteworthy was his development of Rendez-Vous Canada, which is Canada’s premier annual international tourism industry marketplace that brings over $400 million of new business to Canada every year. In addition, LaFleche has served as CEO and Vice President of the Niagara Falls Canada Visitor & Convention Bureau and is presently serving as Chairman of the Board of Directors of Routes to Learning Canada. He has worked on various committees with ABA, NTA, SITA, ATTA, SKAL, and, most importantly, with the Educational Travel Conference. LaFleche served on the ETC Advisory Council and is now an Emeritus Council member.