OUR NORTHSTAR
We Design for Awe
Standing alone at the base of a crashing waterfall has a way of putting your inbox in perspective. A good safari guide turns the landrover off before the herd moves at first light, because your soul needs the quiet to expand.
Research says you can hold about seven things in your mind at once. When those slots are full of cab lines and lost reservations, there's no room left for the moment you came for. We design for awe and handle everything in the way of it.
Money, health, the house, the taxes. You have a team to manage all of it for you. Then the two weeks a year meant to matter most get planned by you, at midnight, in a browser with thirty tabs open.
Close your tabs. Trust an expert. Every Bell & Bly trip starts with a premise, the reason this trip needs to happen now, then gets built around the moments most likely to shift your perspective. We book it all, brief everyone involved, and have people on call if anything comes up. You've been the producer and director on every other trip you've taken.
On your next trip, be the guest.
Your Leisure Time Deserves an Advisor
A Team Effort
Our global team is based on four continents. One spent six years inside Qatar Airways in aeropolitical affairs, which is useful on the day your connection falls apart. One came up through hotels, starting at the Shangri-La, so he knows exactly who to ask and for what. One worked for Colombia's national tourism board so she can tell the genuinely excellent from the ones that just hired a good photographer. Our combined experience enhances every one of our trips.
Most agencies hand your trip to a single advisor. We run it the way a firm runs a case. Your dedicated Designer and Coordinator stick with you over time, learning the hotels you love, the things your family disagrees on, and that you like your museum visits kept short. But in the background, the entire Bell & Bly team weighs in on your itinerary, each with their own interests and specialties. It’s one of the reasons Virtuoso named us the most innovative travel agency in the world.
Sarah Groen
Sarah founded Bell & Bly in 2018 for her network of entrepreneurs and executives who couldn’t find a true advisor to effectively plan luxury travel. She and her friends paid wealth managers, attorneys, personal trainers and assistants, yet somehow travel was something they all DIY’d late at night. She felt deeply that travel was one of the most effective ways to build relationships and expand perspectives and believed it deserved more thoughtful attention.
This strong pull towards travel has been a calling for Sarah since a young age. In first grade, growing up in Corpus Christi, Texas, Sarah wrote in a school autobiography “I love travel and learning Spanish,” before she had even left the state. After traveling as a teen, studying abroad twice, and visiting 110 countries across all seven continents, the belief that travel is a force for good was cemented.
Being a recovering investment banker, private equity associate, and Uber employee, Sarah wanted to ground this belief in research so went back for a Master’s in Positive Psychology at Penn, studying under the founder of the field, Martin Seligman. Her research at Penn developed into Bell & Bly’s methods: every itinerary gets built around the moments most likely to shift how a person sees things, with the logistics handled so those moments have room to land. VIP arrival service and hotels that provide the comfort to truly enjoy a destination aren’t luxurious for luxury’s sake - they allow the true luxury to unfold: time with loved ones uninterrupted by hassles.
Sarah also holds an MBA from Stanford and a BBA in Finance from the University of Texas. She hosts the top podcast in luxury travel, Luxury Travel Insider, and has won various industry awards from Virtuoso’s “Most Innovative Advisor” to a spot on Travel & Leisure’s coveted A-List. Sarah has also endowed a scholarship at University of Texas to fund study abroad students into perpetuity.
CEO / OWner
Rachael Armstrong
Over the last 15 years, Rachel has worked nearly every role that goes into planning a trip and now runs operations, setting the rigorous standards the design team works to. Rachael holds a BFA in Film & Television production which taught her a love for developing processes around creativity.
General Manager
Oscar Alcantara
Senior Travel designer
Oscar designs itineraries and works the mechanics underneath them: the sequencing, the pacing, and the small decisions that determine how a week feels. Before Bell & Bly he built destination catalogs for a travel startup, mapping what was worth doing city by city. He calls Mexico City home and holds a BA in Political Science.
Jazmín Dalinkevicius
SENIOR Travel designer
Jazmín spent six years at Qatar Airways in aeropolitical affairs, working on the agreements and route rights that govern international flying. She is a mom to two, calls Buenos Aires home, and designs itineraries with close attention to how a trip moves: routing that makes sense and experiences that bond families. Jazmin holds a BS in Communications Sciences.
Ana Manrique
Travel designer
Ana worked for Colombia’s national tourism board, on the side of the desk that vets the experiences and logistics that make a country worth visiting. She holds a BA in Political science, has lived and worked in Cape Town, South Africa, and has a contagious passion for surprising and delighting clients.
Mónica Soto
ASSISTANT TRAVEL COORDINATOR
Mónica has traveled to more than 33 countries, including a three-year stretch solo traveling. Prior to Bell & Bly, Monica earned a BA in Foreign Languages and lived and worked in Krakow, Poland. Monica’s focus is attention to every little detail of your trip and is passionate about helping people see more of the world.
Santiago Granados
ASSISTANT TRAVEL COORDINATOR
Santiago came up through hotels, starting with an internship at the luxury hotel brand, Shangri-La and later planning detailed itineraries for inbound travel agencies. He holds a BA in Tourism and Hospitality Management and knows how properties run and who to ask for what.
Dydia Hernandez
OFFICE MANAGER
Before joining Bell & Bly, Dydia worked in real estate private equity and politics. She holds a BA in Communications and runs the systems and administration that let us operate as one team. Dydia grew up steeped in travel through her family’s investments in in-bound tourism to Mexico.
Cathy Ruiz
Before joining Bell & Bly, Cathy guided tours and worked in the cruise industry in Valparaiso, Chile, the coastal town she calls home. She holds a BA in Communication & Journalism and lived in London for two years earning an MA in Creative & Cultural Industries. Cathy works alongside Sarah to design experiences based on positive psychology research.
SENIOR TRAVEL COORDINATOR
Biljana Trajkovska
podcast manager
Biljana produces Luxury Travel Insider, managing the scheduling, production, and guest relationships behind nearly 300 episodes.
Shyann Hue
Shyann has a background in software project management and holds a BA in Agriculture Science & Education. She handles the records and documentation behind every trip and makes sure our back office accounting and reporting runs smoothly.
back office coordinator
Core Values
Great trips are the result of thousands of decisions, all guided by a simple set of beliefs about people, hospitality, curiosity, and the way travel should feel. While most companies paste core values on the wall and forget them, we live by ours, both personally and professionally.
Cultivate Wellbeing
Every trip we build is grounded in positive psychology research. We design travel to nurture joy, connection, and meaning, from awe-filled moments in nature to a dinner no one wants to leave. Each journey is crafted to help our clients flourish and build happiness that lasts well after they return home.
We take the same approach with our team. Most agencies burn people out with long hours and no reprieve. We manage our team's workload and sense of meaning deliberately, because happy designers build better trips. That's why we employ more team members per revenue dollar than most top agencies in our industry.
Design for Human Flourishing
Always Be Learning
Our curiosity is two-fold: We seek to learn as much as we can about places, the same way we seek to learn as much as we can about our clients. Someone from our team is almost always traveling, scouting, and asking questions. And we learn just as much about our clients, how they like to travel, and what kinds of experiences light them up. We take notes on all of it. Our clients reap the rewards.
Stay CURIOUS
Love Our Clients
Travel is deeply personal. To design well, we get to the heart of what matters most to our clients. We sweat the details they shouldn’t have to think about, and always look for opportunities to surprise and delight along the way.
Our designers and coordinators are not paid commission, because they should be designing for what’s best for you. When we have to decide between what’s best for our clients and best for ourselves, we use this core value as a guiding light, always remembering to Love Our Clients first.
PUT PEOPLE FIRST
WELL-TRAVELED, HAVE OPINIONS
The hotel isn’t just “where you’re sleeping.”
It’s the vessel through which you experience the destination. Choose wisely.
You think you want to see Japan during cherry blossom season.
You don’t.
Sunrise experiences are almost always worth it.
Paying extra for sunset cruises or dining spots usually isn’t.
You say you want to see the Great Migration.
We’ll let you in on a much better experience.
Named for Intrepid Explorers
OUR NAMESAKES
Gertrude Bell and Nellie Bly never met, but they shared one habit: following their curiosity in search of awe and beauty. They crossed oceans in the late 19th century, a time when most women wouldn't dare. Nellie Bly was 25 when she traveled around the world in a mere 72 days, filing stories as a journalist the whole way.
Gertrude Bell finished Oxford in two years and became the first woman to earn top honors. She was 20. She climbed new routes in the Alps, learned Persian and Arabic, published translations of Hafiz, and spent two decades riding through Syria and Mesopotamia mapping ruins no one had yet recorded.
GERTRUDE BELL
NELLIE BLY
Travel for Awe and Beauty
"To sit on a quiet deck, to have a star-lit sky the only light above or about, is, to me, paradise."
- Nellie Bly
"To wake in that desert dawn was like waking in the heart of an opal."
Gertrude Bell
Psychologists have a name for it now. Awe: the sense of being small inside something vast. The research says it gives people a deep feeling of connection to the world and makes us more generous. But awe isn't an emotion we feel sitting at home on our couch, we must intentionally put ourselves in places that evoke it. Bell & Bly built their lives around this feeling because they kept seeking it.
Our core ethos: choose awe is based on the lives of these two remarkable women, we just backed it up with modern research.
