Kate Sullivan, one of Reco’s expert Trip Designers and a Washington, D.C.-based former corporate paralegal, is a travel junkie and self-professed “precision planner.” In Covid-19’s haze, safety is paramount, and domestic destinations and road trips are more alluring than ever before. “Circumstantially, we’re going to be constrained by what feels safe and what is just not legally allowed, as well as what certain communities are looking for,” she says. “For example, with smaller communities, are they so dependent on summer travel as part of their economy that they want travelers to come back? Or are they cognizant that their supply chains and their healthcare systems are a little bit delicate?” She sees renting houses with family and friends and hunkering down together as one way to approach Summer 2020 travel safer. “I just was looking into this yesterday for a couple of clients. There are definitely luxury rental options. We all miss our people we haven’t seen in a long time, and that’s a way to spend time together without being out in communities you don’t know, mixing it up.”

Also no surprise: road trips are resurgent. “Driving vacations are definitely going to make a comeback,” Sullivan says. “New sanitation efforts, although they’ll hopefully keep us safer, mean that travelers may have to plan to spend a few extra hours at the airport. Over time, these efforts can also cause flights to become more expensive—all of that leads back to more regional exploration. We’ll look around us to see things that we’ve maybe taken for granted.” On Sullivan’s own regional list: Charlottesville and Shenandoah. “There’s a lot of things within five or six hours of Washington, D.C. that would be great to explore, and I’ve been so busy jetting around the world I haven’t really looked in my own backyard, and I think that’s true for a lot of people.” Road trips are also close to heart for Sullivan: “The most dramatic travel memory I have as a child is going on an RV trip with my grandparents and my sister from Michigan all through the west, to the Badlands, to the Corn Palace, to Yellowstone, to Colorado. I think we were gone for three weeks. I was eight or nine, and the landscape is so stunning and so unlike anything I’d seen.” A plus for Reco users? You can filter your search by state to find great, authentic experiences nearby. However you approach travel right now, just be sure to suss out local health news before you go. “On a very practical level, what does the COVID situation look like in a place? Does it seem like their resources are already stretched? Maybe that’s a place you put on the list for next year, and not this year,” Sullivan says. Not sure where to start your research? This type of expertise can be a reason to tap Trip Designers. Trip Design has “really evolved into this more personalized, specialized, focused experience. It’s much less order taking and much more collaborative,” says Sullivan, who strives to get a true sense of her clients’ tastes and preferences. “I always tell people the smaller the detail that you can think of, the more useful it may be for me to just get a sense of who you are as a person and what it is that you’re looking for. I get to know my clients really, really well.” And who wouldn’t want that type of support?