Arizona Cardinals wide receiver Larry Fitzgerald is a powerful example of staying positive at a time when it would be easy to focus on all that has changed and been lost. Like all of us, he had many different plans during the pandemic— including a trip to Greece.
“I was really trying to get there, I love that place,” Fitzgerald said, while taking a break during a busy day, just as training camp was getting underway in Arizona. But that trip was not to be. Neither was a possible journey to Iran, what would have been the 107th country he has visited.
“That’s the cradle of civilization,” he said. “I love the Persian Empire and the history behind it…I have a lot of Iranian friends, Persian friends. They always rave about how beautiful the country is. And the other thing I like about it is that it’s not a place everybody travels to. It’s not a travel hotspot, like France or Italy, where there’s millions and millions of tourists there.”
Fitzgerald likes going off the beaten path and showing others how to get there. He says it’s a big reason why he teamed up with partners to start his own travel agency, Nomad Hill, in 2016. “I would travel, and I was like, man, I wish that my brother or my dad, or, you know, my friends could experience it the way I'm experiencing it right now. And I wanted other people to be able to see some of the things and experience some of the things that I was doing, and I thought long and hard about it. And I came to the conclusion: I want to do this as a business because this is something other people need to enjoy.”
He says it wasn’t easy swatting away the travel bug when the lockdown started in March. “It's been the toughest year ever, in terms of not being able to do anything,” he said. “I was in New Zealand for about 10 days, the latter part of February. And it was right when, you know, things were kind of starting to heat up. Obviously, I didn't know it was going to be as serious as it was, but Europe was starting to kind of have a little bit of issue. Where I was, there were no problems, but you could see the hysteria was kind of picking up and after that I just pretty much got back home and shut it down. I didn't go anywhere for a while, and so I definitely missed it.”
But instead of dwelling on what he missed, he has focused on what the pandemic afforded him. “I've been able to get so much done this off-season, more than I ever have in the last seven off-seasons. Because I've had so much time, and I've been able to get a lot of my affairs in order that I’ve been pushing off...It's given me so much time to reflect on myself, things I can improve on, things I can do to be a better father, brother, business, business owner, teammate, community activist. All of these things I've been able to work on that I normally would never have had the time, or as much time. That's been great for me. I've grown immensely as a man over the last five, six months. Because you really find out what's important to you, what matters to you, when you have a lot of free time, right? Because we all have the same amount of time. If you don't have anything going on, you're going to do the things that you want to do.”
Fitzgerald decided he wanted to travel more partly because of his experiences with his family, growing up in Minneapolis. He never did anything he describes as “over the top,” but his domestic trips to destinations like Mount Rushmore and Glacier and Yellowstone National Parks piqued his interest and helped develop his deep love of history. It wasn’t until he reached the N.F.L., and traveled to Australia and New Zealand, that he truly realized his passion. He journeyed for 50 days at the end of 2004, choosing the countries by looking at a map. He still talks dreamily about that first travel experience, detailing his visits to “every single little city you imagine,” driving the Gold Coast and surfing. It was more of a backpacker’s trip versus the high-end travel his agency arranges, but that early trip taught him the value of a travel advisor.
“I didn’t really know the hotels situation, so I stayed in a couple of places I probably wouldn’t stay at now,” he said. “I was doing it online for the most part. I was literally on Expedia or one of these online websites and just doing it right there from my house. I didn’t have anyone telling me, ‘You know, hey I’ve been there, this is something you should try when you’re there.’”
Now he takes a completely different approach, enlisting the help of his business partner Dennis Amodio, managing member of Pinnacle Management Group, a small investment firm that includes Nomad Hill in its portfolio. “When I talk to Dennis now, I'm like, ‘Dennis, this is where I want to go. These are a few of the things I've read about, can you talk to somebody on the ground that has a little bit better understanding and more experience of exactly what a guy like myself would probably enjoy?’ He'll get back to me in a few days with a whole list of experiences that I hadn't even heard about or seen, and it just makes the trip that much better, because I'm getting some great insights.”
Nomad Hill has 10 employees as well as partnerships with DMCs around the world, focusing on Fitzgerald’s first two international destinations, Australia and New Zealand, as well as Africa. Like every other travel business, the company has made tough choices since Covid-19 hit.
“That was something that could have just crippled a company like ours, but we pivoted,” Amadio said. “I don't mean to put out all the football analogies, but it's our background. You're either moving forward or backwards. You can't stay in the same place on the field. And that's something that we share with Larry, and it's motivating for the people that work at our company to say, look you know, you could take Covid and make it a negative, or you could turn it into a positive, and we've even repositioned some of the employees at Nomad Hill to go more upstream. And some of them are making more money now and have their jobs secured. And we didn't take any bailout money.”
Most of the employees transitioned to Pinnacle’s private jet business, Legacy Aviation Group, initially helping clients get home from abroad when the pandemic hit and now, arranging leisure travel. “The business has shifted, Fitzgerald said. “Dennis is in the trenches every day. He kind of just keeps me abreast. The actual travel space has been difficult, but the private aviation has really been doing much better.”
Fitzgerald compares the business successfully making changes to what he now faces on the gridiron. “We have all these different protocols and temperature tests and all the testing every single day,” he said. “It's the people that are able to adjust to the changes the fastest, to modify what their business model was before, to adjust it to what it’s going to be currently and what we're going to have to deal with moving forward. You have to be progressive and innovative in how you approach those things.”
Amadio says he’s seen individual villas in less-populated areas and yacht trips still booking well despite the pandemic. The move towards more private travel is a trend the company had already pinpointed based on demographic analysis. “You’ve got to look for the trends and try to adapt, because if we're just waiting for it to come back, it may never,” he said. “It may come back, but it may not look the same as what it was. You know, the game change.”
Amadio can’t say enough about his partner, complimenting Fitzgerald’s attitude and work ethic. “The guy works harder off the field than he does on the field,” he said. “He just doesn’t stop.” He says Fitzgerald is not just a silent partner; he’s hands-on, always checking on the business and its employees, despite his busy schedule. But Amadio most admires the 11-time Pro-Bowler’s humility.
“I think he hit a hole-in-one (golfing) with (former President Barack) Obama last year,” Amadio said. “And you say, ‘Hey, Larry, congrats on your shot.’ He goes, ‘Oh, it was the wind,’ or ‘Hey, you know, Larry, a nice touchdown.’ He goes, ‘Oh, he hit me right in the chest. How could I not have caught it?’”
That carries over to Fitzgerald’s traveling style. He says he’s generally only recognized by American tourists when he’s overseas, a break from his celebrity status that he appreciates. “I’m a pretty intellectually curious person and I’m more interested in learning about what other people are going through, and what they’re doing, and how they’re living their lives, much more so, than talking about what I’m doing.”
He’s come a long way since his first trip booking on Expedia. Now he enjoys finer elements on the road, saying Amadio has made him a “bougie, bougie guy,” showing him the benefits of a beautiful room at the Four Seasons, though he’s not booking the penthouse. “A standard room at a nice hotel, that has clean sheets and a hot shower, and I'm good. So that's something that I don't necessarily think I need to spend a lot of money on. If I'm going to spend the money, I want to spend it on experiences, experiences that are unique.”
Those types of experiences include biking up to 50 miles a day riding through the countryside in Vietnam, studying how Sumo wrestlers train in Kyoto, Japan and humanitarian missions with N.F.L. teammates to Cambodia and Africa. When many of them see how Fitzgerald travels, they want to do the same. Amadio says: “Larry might have spoken to a teammate or even a competitor and they'll say they want to go to Africa and they say, ‘Well, where's Larry been?’ And they say, ‘Well, let's just do that.’ Because they feel that he's the authority on travel. Because he's been there so many times. Or I won't mention the guy, but Larry has spoken so much about photography and everything, the guy went out and bought the same camera that Larry had.”
Fitzgerald considers himself an ambassador of travel to those in the league who are not travel buffs like him. “The guys I work with, a lot of these guys are from the inner city,” he said. “They don't necessarily have a great interest to travel really, to be honest with you. It really just depends on your environment and how you grew up and what you're interested in. My grandfather, back in the fifties and sixties, was taking my grandma to Monaco and on these great international trips, but he had the means to be able to do that. And a very long time ago, he would tell my mom and dad and my aunts and uncles about it. And then he would tell his grandchildren, who I was, about it, and that kind of piqued my interest. And that made me want to go to some of those places. So, it's really about the environment that you grow up in and who you learned it from.”
Fitzgerald does hope to see more people of color in the travel business, saying he’s never met a fellow minority owner of an agency. He says he also doesn’t often see many Americans of color traveling overseas. He’s constantly trying to spread the message of why travel is so transformational. “There's so much value, so much value,” he said. “It changed my perspective on life. As you get the chance to see people, different religions and meet people, because, if you live in middle America and you never get a chance to travel and you live in this kind of community where this is the kind of people you're around all the time, how would you ever understand anybody else's culture or religion? How would you ever know that these people are just as good as the family that you're from, and have the same love and admiration for their country? When you travel, you're able to experience that firsthand. You're able to feel it, the love and the unity of that place. And then it just lets you know that man, people are people, anywhere you go, and I think it just gives you a better understanding.”
Fitzgerald thinks travel will boom again very soon. “I think there's going to be a huge demand once we have that vaccine, and we can figure out how we can travel safely, and people can get out and do what they love to do. So, I think we're around the corner. Obviously, we have a little way to go.” But as he always does, he’s staying optimistic. “And I would encourage other people to do the same thing, because it's difficult enough when you control things and most things in life you can't control. And so, to get bent out of shape about things that you can't control, it doesn't really suit you, it doesn't serve you either.”
This article was originally written by Wendy Gillette for Travel Advisor Magazine in Fall 2020.
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