About Us

Our Founder

Our founder and owner, Katharine Christmas, takes pride in being our client service lead. If you work with us, she will be your main point of contact.

Katharine has an eclectic background in international business and has lived, worked, and traveled all over the world. She has been to all 7 continents and 40+ countries. Katharine's early jobs ranged from being a bartender at Mad Dogs, an iconic British pub in Hong Kong, to a researcher for National Geographic Television, where she became an expert on the giant muntjac, an ancient, elusive deer species in Vietnam. Eventually, she found her niche in the area of client service, working for two of the world's top advertising agencies, Leo Burnett International and Ogilvy & Mather. Her clients were senior executives at global brands like McDonald's, Volvo, Philip Morris, and Disney and that career led her from Hong Kong to Chicago to Singapore. In total, Katharine spent 9 years living in Asia, split between Hong Kong, Singapore and Tokyo. In Tokyo, she thrived as a stay-at-home mom.

Katharine has a B.A. in Classics from Haverford College in Pennsylvania. She spent her entire junior year abroad in Greece, where she traveled extensively. She received an M.B.A. from Cornell University's Johnson Graduate School of Management, where she was a Roy H. Park Fellow. There, her focus was international business and she interned in London in the Equities division of Goldman Sachs.

Katharine lives in the Chicago area with her husband of 25 years and two rescue dogs. She has two young adult children whom she has taken around the world on both fun and educational adventures. Katharine is a dual citizen of the United States and Latvia.

Our Business Model

While brick-and-mortar travel agencies have been around for several decades, our business model, a network of international partnerships, is decidedly 21st Century. We're structured this way because it allows us to be simultaneously global & local, and established yet nimble.

Our client service team is based out of our main office in suburban Chicago. Our accounting, flight (ticketing and 24/7 support), and partner support (primarily Virtuoso partners, but also many others) is out of our host agency, Travel Experts, Inc., in Raleigh, North Carolina. Our technology support is through Hostinger and TravelWits.

When you come to us with a request for a custom trip, we will work with one of our amazing, country-focused Destination Management Company (DMC) partners, which are located all over the world in local markets. Each DMC supplies us with on-the-ground support teams of real people who are experts in the places they live and work: local drivers and tour guides, knowledgeable experts on history, naturalists, and more. These relationships are many years in the making and they are essential to our business.

Our Philosphy

At Kiki's Travel Service, we believe that travel can be a net positive for the world.

Travel encourages real life, face-to-face encounters with people who speak different languages, eat different food, and follow different religions. It is our belief that such encounters nurture mutual understanding and respect across cultures and ethnicities.

Also, when done right, travel encourages an appreciation for nature. When a traveller witnesses the magic of a humpback whale breaching, they are more likely to care about plastic waste in the oceans and whale safety in shipping lanes. If they have the privilege of standing among thousands of monarch butterflies in mountainous Mexico, they are more likely to want to plant a pollinator garden in their own backyard.

Finally, we have experienced firsthand how responsible tourism can be used to preserve ecosystems and protect animals by creating a financial safety net for their surrounding communities.

While we believe these things, that doesn't absolve us from having to work to create the most responsible travel plans we can. That may mean something as simple as using trains instead of planes for some legs of a journey. It definitely means not booking animal encounters that aren't thoroughly vetted. Whenever possible, we try to reward partners that do things like track their carbon footprints and eliminate single use plastics. And we're conscious of the impact of over-tourism, especially during peak seasons and in response to trending social media. To that end, we are always on the look out for great off-the-beaten-path destinations as well as off-season and shoulder-season travel opportunities. By providing our clients with accurate information about the full range of great experiences they can have in a given destination, we aspire to literally "spread the joy" of travel.

An independent affiliate of Travel Experts, Inc., a Forbes Travel Guide endorsed agency and a Virtuoso® member.

© 2026 Katharine Christmas LLC. All rights reserved.

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