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ABOUT MOCKINGBIRD
Go farther, do good, and transform.
Who is Mockingbird Travel, anyway?
Let me sum up: Mockingbird Travel, LLC is a socially conscious, woman-owned, for-profit business based in Washington, DC. We offer travel consulting services for the discerning and engaged traveler. A portion of our proceeds goes to worthy global health projects around the world.
We hope that after spending some time on this website, you've gotten a good sense of our values, our mission, and our passion - and what makes us different from other tour companies. In case your curiosity about us still isn't satiated, you can read on for the story of our beginnings, why we're named after a bird that once dive-bombed our founder, and a few final thoughts on our travel philosophy. We love what we do here, and we thank you for entrusting your precious vacation days to our care.
It’s tricky to find the perfect name for a budding business. Somewhere in the process, “mockingbird” suddenly popped up. How fortuitous that it did.
Mockingbirds are curious and fearless. They listen to the songs of the birds around them and echo the notes back to the world, making them their own. Good travelers have much in common with the mockingbird: they push themselves beyond their fears, they explore and observe, and they incorporate pieces of other cultures and places into their own unique expression of life.
We also learned that mockingbirds represent self-discovery, learning through experience, and finding one’s true purpose. Few things in life provide a more powerful avenue to accomplishing these goals than the act of travel.
And as we were considering whether Mockingbird should be, well, Mockingbird, we noticed this little quote at the bottom of a painting that has hung on our office walls for (literally) a decade. Clearly, it was meant to be.
“Mockingbirds . . . don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.”
- Harper Lee
WHY IS MOCKINGBIRD ... MOCKINGBIRD?
Or, What's with the Name?
HOW TO TRAVEL LIKE A MOCKINGBIRD
(We recommend it.)
We expect a lot of ourselves here at Mockingbird. So it seems only fair that we expect a few things from our travelers, too. To travel well with Mockingbird, we ask our travelers to follow two simple principles:
1. Be a health-responsible traveler. The health systems of many of our destinations are already strained, and we don’t want our visit to tax them further. We want to keep our travelers healthy, and we don’t want to spread illness to other populations. For these reasons, we encourage our travelers to receive all recommended vaccines and to purchase travel insurance. We also strongly encourage our travelers not to travel when they’re sick (for everyone’s sake) and to be mindful of their actions while traveling to keep themselves healthy for the duration of the trip. Travel insurance can protect you if you need to cancel a trip for illness or if you require medical attention or evacuation while abroad.
2. Go farther. As much as we love Paris (and we really love Paris), we want our travelers to stretch themselves and go outside of their comfort zones. We simply ask that you open yourself to a new kind of travel experience. And while you’re at it, there’s no reason to limit that open-mindedness to your vacation plans. Take the energy you gain from a Mockingbird travel experience and feed it back into other areas of your life. Follow the example of the fearless mockingbird: go farther, do good, and transform.